ACROSS THE 
BLOCKADE 

H.N.BRAILSFORD 




GwrightN?__i3_Lf3. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSE 



ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 



ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

A RECORD OF TRAVELS 
IN ENEMY EUROPE 



BY 



HENRY NOEL BRAILSFORD 



■ 



NEW YORK 

HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE 

1919 



XI 5^ 

Site 5 



COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY 
HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 



NOV 22 1919 



THE OUINN ft BODEN COMPANY 
RAHWAY. N. J 



©CI.A536G61 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

NOTE 



I. IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY . 

II. IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA . 

III. HUNGER AND REVOLUTION IN VIENNA 

IV. A DEAD CITY IN POLAND 
V. ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA . 

VI. THE POLISH JEWS 

VII. POLAND AS BARRIER . 

VIII. AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 

IX. THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY . 

X. THE NEW MILITARISM 

XL A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 



Vll 

1 

37 

51 

59 

69 

82 

97 

114 

134 

149 

161 



NOTE 

This book records impressions formed during 
four months spent in blockaded Europe between 
February and May, 1919. I owe my acknowledge- 
ments to the editors of the Daily Herald, the Na- 
tion, the New Republic, and the Manchester Guard- 
ian, in whose columns part of some of the follow- 
ing chapters originally appeared. 

The footnotes are of a later date than the 
articles themselves. The undated chapters were 
written after my return to England. 

H. N. BRAILSFORD. 
June 1919. 



ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 

Among memories of four months ' travel in Cen- 
tral Europe, a night journey from Vienna to Buda- 
pest stands vividly out. It was cold, and the 
heating apparatus of the train did not work. For 
lack of fuel we traveled in a crawling train. For 
lack of fuel we were put on a half -ration of light. 
The covering of the seats had been cut away, as 
usual, by desperate men in search of material for 
clothes. The darkness, the cold, the discomfort, 
the dirt — it was all typical of the condition to 
which war and the blockade have reduced all 
Europe east of the Ehine. 

Two fellow-passengers sat in the dim light and 
talked incessantly. They were average members 
of the once comfortable middle-class, one a small 
capitalist and the other a doctor, neighbors in a 
German- Austrian town near the Hungarian fron- 
tier. What they said was not exceptionally inter- 
esting, but it filled in for me the picture of daily 
life of which this desolate train was the frame. 
They talked at first of clothes and food. Neither 

1 



2 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

had bought a new suit for over three years. The 
doctor had poor relations, and he had gradually- 
given his wardrobe away : he now possessed only 
the old suit that he wore. One of the couple from 
reasons of economy had stopped drinking beer: 
the other had given up tobacco. As for meat and 
bacon, they had long ago cut down their three 
meat meals a day to one: of late the doctor had 
tried to do without that one. 

"What troubles me most," said the capitalist, 
who had evidently closed down his factory, "is 
that every day one or another of my old work- 
men comes to me for help. I can't refuse. But 
if it goes on much longer, I shall be condemning 
my own children to starvation." 

"Yes," answered the doctor, "there's not 
much charity left in the world to-day. Homo 
homini lupus. I performed a difficult operation 
on a farmer's wife last week. Yesterday I called 
again. She kissed my hand and said I had saved 
her life. As I went out, I saw that the farmer 
was killing a pig. I asked him to sell me a ham. 
'I have nothing to spare for strangers,' was the 
man's answer — and I had just saved his wife's 
life. . . . We are all getting selfish. I sometimes 
think men have given too much. . . . The strain 
has been too great. For four years men have been 
pouring out life, blood, health, all they had, for 
their country. If you had sat at their deathbeds, 
as I had to do in the field-hospital, and taken down 
their last messages to wife and children as they 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 3 

lay in agony, you would know what this war has 
cost." 

So the desultory talk went on. I will not try to 
recall the doctor's moving tales of the field-hos- 
pital, nor his anger against the general staff and 
the war-makers in Vienna, though that, too, was 
part of the desolation. The moral capital of these 
men was gone — the loyalties, the conventions, the 
megalomania, the clap-trap. They had gone bank- 
rupt in illusions, and the lies that had sustained 
them had lost their power. 

The doctor was an altruist, but before long the 
capitalist had brought back the talk to his own 
sad case. " Think of it, man," he was saying. 
1 ' Do you realize what the fall of the krone means ! 
All we have falls with it. We used to be able to 
buy 105 francs with 100 kronen, and now we can 
barely get 17. It's ruin. It means that none of 
us is worth a fifth of what we had," and then he 
went on to propound a muddle-headed theory that 
mortgages at least were safe. The doctor had a 
clear head, and he tore that imagination to pieces. 
1 ' Look here," he said, "you advanced 10,000 
kronen on a cottage before the war. You paid 
out kronen that were kronen. To-day, your man 
pays you back, but he pays you in kronen that are 
worth only a fifth of their old value. You lose 
four in five. No, no, mortgages are no safer than 
anything else." "Then I'm ruined," said the 
small capitalist, and he sank into gloomy silence 
till the train drew up at his station. 



4 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

Half an hour later the train crossed the frontier 
into Hungary. Flags were flying. There was a 
strange electric air of animation in the station. 
On the Austrian side of the line men bent their 
heads and said that they were ruined. On the 
Hungarian side they had taken the plunge. Debts 
and mortgages, loans and share-capital, all the 
old lumber had gone, and men walked with quicker 
steps because they were facing a new life. After 
that conversation in the train I began to under- 
stand why the opposition to the Social Revolution 
in Budapest had been so slight. Are one's privi- 
leges as a "bourgeois" worth defending, when 
one has had to drop all the small luxuries of life? 
Does one battle for respectability, when one's 
wardrobe is reduced to the last three-year-old 
suit 1 Does one fight for property when its meas- 
ure in currency has sunk to 20 per cent.? There 
are two factors in every revolution, the impetus 
of the force that makes for change, and conviction 
of the forces that resist it. When every bourgeois 
knows already that he is ruined, who is going to 
rush the Bolshevist barricades? 

The Austrian-German is by nature inert, sym- 
pathetic, artistic, witty, and under happy condi- 
tions gay, but he lacks energy and constructive 
power. Budapest is largely a Jewish town, but 
its Jewish population, neither persecuted nor iso- 
lated as in Poland, has dropped orthodoxy and 
the old Yiddish speech. It has adopted Magyar 
names, talks Magyar at home, and used to culti- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 5 

vate a robust Magyar patriotism. It is lively, 
restless, nervous, energetic, alert to every new 
thing. It found in Communism the violent stim- 
ulus which it needed in the hour of despair and 
defeat. With a nearly unanimous impetus the 
< ' intellectuals ' ' (many of them Jews) had flung 
themselves with the Magyar workmen of the 
towns into Communism. The thing to us seems 
inconceivable. One must remember that there is 
no old middle class in Hungary. There are the 
recently-rich, the stock-brokers, the war profiteers, 
the professional men. This society is accustomed 
to sudden gains and sudden losses. No one save 
the landed nobility has any long tradition. This 
race has the gambler's instinct, and any one who 
has heard Hungarian music knows with what fire 
the blood of this people moves. Three weeks ago 
private ownership in capital disappeared in a 
night. People adapted themselves with amazing 
versatility to the change. I found the Ministries 
thronged with eager applicants for jobs. Counts 
had new visiting cards printed without their titles. 
Bankers and factory-managers wore red badges 
in their coats. Ladies of noble family found work 
as translators or teachers or musicians, and 
laughed gaily at the discovery that they had a 
value in the labor market. I spent an afternoon 
in a salon frequented by landowners who had lost 
their titles and their estates. The men were far 
from cheerful, but the women were obviously stim- 
ulated by the new adventure of looking for work. 



6 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

They had all succeeded, and some Jia,d met with 
kindness on the way. One professed herself al- 
ready an ardent Communist. Emancipation had 
come to them unexpectedly and unsought, and 
they quitted their old empty lives with little regret. 
I met gloomy people who complained. I heard 
of suicides, but in the main the mood was one of 
excitement at the strangeness and novelty of the 
Revolution. The Government had the wisdom 
to cultivate a mood of gaiety and rejoicing, and 
it summoned the arts to its aid. A recruiting 
procession for the Red Guard was a veritable 
pageant. The leading actors recited new revolu- 
tionary poems at the street corners, as the pro- 
cession halted, and the favorites of the Opera 
sang in the service of the new idea. One had the 
irresistible feeling in these bright days of spring, 
as the music of these festivals floated on the lilac- 
scented air over the swift Danube, that youth and 
art, and talent and the creative impulse, were with 
this spirited movement. There was no mistaking 
the enthusiasm of the city crowd during these 
processions and reviews. Every one expected that 
Vienna would follow Munich and "go Bolshevik" 
soon (which it will not do), and the general belief 
was that when the Entente attempts to impose its 
crushing peace terms, all Europe would seek es- 
cape in Communism, from the Urals to the Rhine. 
Budapest felt itself in the fashion. Older men 
said philosophically (I am quoting a Professor of 
History, well known in England), "It was inevit- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 7 

able. It is the fault of the Entente. One must 
recognize that the era of capitalism is finally over 
in Central Europe. We can adjust ourselves to 
Communism. The happy thing is that the change, 
thanks to Bela Kun, has come in such an orderly 
way. ' } 

It is common form in the oratory and journa- 
lism of the West to identify Bolshevism and anar- 
chy. The traveler who enters Communist Hun- 
gary with that illusion is destined to a crescendo 
of disappointment. There is in Europe to-day no 
city more monotonously orderly than Budapest, \/ 
and the stranger who expected confusion emerges 
in the end a little stifled by the oppressive order. 
The Communism which prevails in Hungary re- 
flects the later phases of the Bussian Bevolution. 
Its first principle is authority, and with all the 
enthusiasm of a new faith it is creating also a 
more than Roman discipline. The daily papers 
have been turned into gazettes which devote inter- 
minable columns to the edicts and legislation of 
the new Government. Page after page is filled 
with " orders" which regulate every phase of life 
from the distribution of boots to the repertoire 
of the theater. Their tone is sharp and per- 
emptory, and most of them contain a threat which 
has become a commonplace of Communist style 
— that the least resistance will be punished by 
death. The official smiles as he pens the conven- 
tional words, for in point of fact after three weeks 
of proletarian dictatorship only one death sen- 



8 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

tence has been passed by the revolutionary tri- 
bunal, and even that has not been executed. The 
only people who have been shot were two or three 
Red Guards who attempted to pillage. The 
strange thing is that these orders are obeyed. 
Tips are forbidden, and waiters actually return 
them with a gesture of outraged virtue. Alcohol 
is prohibited, and no one dares to drink. There 
is no terror, for there is no resistance. A lead- 
ing Communist explained to me with a good deal 
of humor why they had succeeded in imposing 
obedience without bloody severity. "The bour- 
geois Press," he said, "did our terrorism for us. 
For months before the Revolution, it had been 
publishing its interminable inventions about the 
Red Terror in Russia. The result was that every 
one believed that Communists are cannibals or 
worse. The result is that we are spared the 
trouble of being severe. We have only to apeak 
to be obeyed." The essential difference between 
Russia and Hungary lies in the fact that the 
Hungarian proletariat was from the first united. 
There are no Mensheviki and no Social Revolu- 
tionaries in Hungary, and consequently there has 
been no attempt to sabotage by the intellectuals. 
The Social Democrats and the Communists fused 
their separate organizations at the moment of the 
Revolution to form a united Socialist party. The 
orthodox Socialists supplied the numbers, the 
Communists the driving force. The new move- 
ment stepped into a political vacuum. Defeat and 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 9 

the collapse of Magyar Imperialism had ruined 
all the parties of the old regime. Even the Left 
had abdicated. The Radicals had already dis- 
solved their party organization before the coup 
d'etat and had rallied to the support of the So- 
cialists. The other parties had been shattered 
by the catastrophic end of the war and the assassi- 
nation of Count Tisza. Morally and materially 
the old order was bankrupt. 

To see the Communist Revolution in its his- 
torical perspective, we must understand the ex- 
perience through which Hungary had passed be- 
tween October and March. The autumn Revolu- 
tion had broken with the feudal past. Universal 
suffrage, after a generation of struggle, had come 
at last, and the long oppression of the subject 
races was ended for all time. Even in the hour of 
disaster, however, the Magyars had found it hard 
to'believe that the Entente would really dismember 
their country. The integrity of the lands that 
belonged to St. Stephen's Crown was a sacro- 
sanct superstition. For the utmost concessions 
in the shape of Home Rule for Slovaks, Roumani- 
ans, and Serbs the Magyars were prepared, but 
not for the final alienation of the territories in- 
habited by these races, which happen to include 
some of the richest cornlands, together with the 
few coal-mines of Hungary. The ruling caste was 
prepared to acquiesce in the choice of Count 
Michael Karolyi as President of the Republic, 
largely because it imagined that his reputation 



10 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

would conciliate the Entente. It certainly ought to 
have done so. Though himself an aristocrat, linked 
by birth and marriage to the ruling oligarchy, he 
had always battled manfully and honestly for an 
honest, democratic franchise. Throughout the 
war, with astonishing courage, he had made 
openly pacifist speeches in the Diet, and had op- 
posed the Prussian-Magyar alliance. The En- 
tente, however, was in no way placated by the 
choice of Karolyi. I met him in Budapest and 
heard his story from his own lips. Evidently a 
man of independence and force of character, he 
is also a good talker and has a perfect command 
of English. Early in his brief period of power he 
had met the French General Franchet d'Esperey, 
who commanded in the East, only to encounter 
that insolence which we used to consider a pecu- 
liarly Prussian characteristic. Throughout the 
winter the blockade was maintained in full rigor, 
though the whole Hungarian army had been dis- 
banded. The material sufferings of this armistice 
period were infinitely worse than those of the 
war, for now the little central area of purely 
Magyar Hungary was isolated, and cut off from 
all its normal sources of supply. Fuel was al- 
most unobtainable, and, as Karolyi put it, the 
task of finding just enough coal to provide Buda- 
pest with a minimum of light and power was "a 
daily anguish/' The cold months went by, in 
ever-growing want and despair. The Roumani- 
ans, had occupied Transylvania, and as its Mag- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 11 

yar and German inhabitants (not much, if at all, 
less than half the population of the occupied area) 
fled from the harsh rule of the invaders, Budapest 
was overcrowded with hundreds of thousands of 
refugees, who had all to be housed and fed. The 
more moderate Socialists had joined the Radicals 
in forming a Coalition Cabinet but the Left Wing 
and the Communists were working outside it for 
a social revolution. Two considerations, as he 
told me, influenced Karolyi to make his startling 
gesture of despair in the last week of March, when 
he resigned his office as President of the Eepublic 
and handed over power to a Dictatorship of the 
Proletariat. One of them was a certainty that 
the Revolution must presently come, with his as- 
sent or without it: he preferred that it should 
come bloodlessly. The other was the perception 
that the Entente was determined to impose a 
Peace of Strangulation, under which it would be 
impossible for Hungary to live. Two events pre- 
cipitated his decision. One of them was the ar- 
rival of a Note, couched in dictatorial language 
(it opened with the words J'ordonne), in which 
the British naval commander of the Danube or- 
dered the Hungarians to hand over their whole 
river mercantile fleet of tugs and barges to the 
Tchechs. The Tchechs had forced their way down 
through alien country to the Danube, had an- 
nexed the purely German river side port of Press- 
burg on the borders of Austria and Hungary, and 
now proposed to set up in business as river- 



12 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

carriers by appropriating the vessels on which 
Budapest depended for all its heavy transport. 
Hard on this Note came another from the French 
Colonel Vix, which ordered the Hungarians to 
give up large reaches of territory, Magyar by 
population and vital to their economic existence, 
which had been left to them under the Armistice. 
What was to be done! To submit to these two 
Notes meant ruin. To resist in isolation was 
equally ruin. One Power, however, still existed 
in Europe which had not bent to the victors. If 
Hungary could come to no understanding with 
the Entente, her obvious course was to turn to 
Russia, but Russia would be her ally only if she 
would herself enter the Moscow International and 
make an end of capitalism within her borders. 
Thus the fear of a bloody rising from below, the 
intolerable pressure of our blockade, and the 
dread of a harsh peace conceived by the French 
"policy of alliances" in the interests of the Rou- 
manians and the Tchechs, all conspired to make 
the Hungarian Revolution. It had, however, a 
more potent psychological cause. In the depths 
of despair the human instinct for self-preserva- 
tion cried out for a new hope. Patriotism was a 
spring broken by the intolerable strain of the war. 
Religion was an official convention linked with 
the old feudalism and the capitalist era. In the 
prudent schemes of opportunist politicians, who 
mixed a little reformist Socialism with middle- 
class Liberalism and the peasant view of land- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 13 

ownership, there was no stimulus for mind or 
will. From the ruined past and the intolerable 
present, Hungary turned to Communism because 
its will could recover health only in gigantic effort 
of creation. There was nothing left that seemed 
worth conserving. Traditions, reverences, catch- 
words — they were all meaningless. Even of prop- 
erty there was little left to defend, for every 
man's wealth had shrunk by the fall of the ex- 
change to a fifth of its old value. One party had 
an energetic belief. There survived no force 
which could oppose it. 

From the first the Revolution had on its side 
the organized manual workers of the towns, es- 
pecially the powerful trade union of metal work- 
ers, whose leader, Garbai, became the President 
of the Communist State. The poorer brain-work- 
ers, especially clerks of all grades, were scarcely 
less well-disposed, for they had become relatively 
more impoverished, during the war and the block- 
ade, than the hand-workers, who alone had con- 
trived to bring their wages into some distant rela- 
tion to the mounting prices. At a big and enthusi- 
astic Communist meeting for the German-speak- 
ing inhabitants of Budapest (they form about a 
quarter of the population) what chiefly impressed 
me was the intense respectability of the audience. 
Judging by appearances they seemed to be chiefly 
clerks, engineers, or skilled artisans, and the well- 
reasoned speeches made a special point of the 
edicts of the Soviet Government, which for the 



14 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

first time in history assured full liberty and en- 
couragement to the German schools, and promised 
them a theater of their own in the capital. It was 
by no means solely or even chiefly to the ' ' ragged 
proletariat" that the new regime appealed. It 
was, indeed, welcomed, or at least tolerated, by 
the intensely chauvinistic Magyar patriots, 
largely because its resistance to the exactions of 
the Entente flattered their nationalism. There is 
little doubt that it profited in some degree from 
this half-conscious emotion of patriotism, but I 
must, in fairness, add that Bela Kun lost no op- 
portunity of disavowing any sentiment so old- 
fashioned. Again and again he declared officially 
that his Government attached no importance 
whatever to the historical integrity of Hungarian 
territory. If they should find themselves in con- 
flict with Koumanians or Tchechs, it would not 
be over racial or territorial issues, but because 
these capitalistic or feudal States were naturally 
at enmity with a proletarian Republic. Though I 
must not quote him as saying so, what I think 
was in Bela Kun's mind was that if Slovakia and 
Roumania were also to become friendly and per- 
haps federated Soviet Republics, the military and 
above all the economic difficulties of Soviet 
Hungary would automatically disappear. There 
would no longer be a menace on their frontiers, 
and the blockade would be replaced by an active 
exchange of goods. How far it was part of hi3 
policy to promote revolution actively among his 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 15 

neighbors I cannot say, but he was naturally too 
cautious to avow it. When I put the question to 
him point-blank, he answered that "Hungary had 
enough to do to save herself, without concerning 
herself with others.' ' That answer would not 
have satisfied the semi-Socialist Government in 
Vienna, which was seriously alarmed by the ac- 
tivity of Hungarian Communist propaganda. 

The spirit of order and authority which marked 
the Communist regime in Hungary reflected the 
remarkable personality of Bela Kun. Unflinch- 
ing in theory and bold in action, he had no liking 
for needless violence, and he detested disorder. 
At the first glance one was impressed by the vital- 
ity and self-possession of the man. He worked 
incessantly, and yet he kept a freshness of mind 
which never failed him when he gave his shrewd 
and logical yet always courteous answers to crit- 
ics. He is still a young man in his thirties, and 
was before the war a Socialist journalist as yet 
unknown to fame. As a junior officer of the 
reserve, he was taken prisoner (like the Austrian 
Foreign Secretary, Dr. Bauer) by the Russians, 
worked energetically as a Bolshevik in Petrograd, 
and came into close touch with Lenin. He was 
a faithful pupil of his master, and knew his mind 
intimately enough to avoid his earlier mistakes. 
It was, indeed, his ambition to apply at once the 
experience gained during the first eighteen months 
of Communist rule in Russia. His courage was 
already legendary, and, like Lenin, he is an opti- 



16 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

mist who never despairs. He was in Moscow dur- 
ing the rising of the Left Socialist Revolution- 
aries against the Bolsheviks. An armored motor- 
car, bristling with machine guns, came rush- 
ing down the street in which the Soviet head- 
quarters stood. Kun was unarmed, but he sallied 
out alone, walked straight to meet the car, jumped 
on the foot-board, and by sheer insistence, audac- 
ity, and magnetism overawed its crew. One by 
one they slunk away, and Bela Kun triumphantly 
drove the captured car to his own quarters. He 
was in prison in Budapest when Karolyi made 
way for the Revolution, and with his body still 
sore from a beating administered by his jailers 
he went straight from his dungeon to the Royal 
Palace on the hill. He improvised an understand- 
ing on behalf of the Communists with the much 
more numerous Social Democrats, and formed a 
mixed Socialist- Communist Government in which 
half the offices fell to his own group. His political 
difficulties were chiefly with the Communist Left 
Wing, which probably would have made a bloody 
terror but for his instinct of order and modera- 
tion. His Ministry, by the average of years, must 
have been one of the youngest that ever held 
power in Europe, but it had a presentable aca- 
demic record. No less than six of the thirty 
Commissioners were University Professors or 
lecturers. 

The daring of the new administration was 
shown in its instant attack upon the problems of 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 17 

daily life. It had to cope with abnormal diffi- 
culties. Budapest was thronged with refugees 
and demobilized soldiers; some say that it had 
double its normal population. The Government 
instantly laid down the principle that every adult 
is entitled to one living room, and no family to 
more than three rooms, apart from the kitchen 
and rooms set aside for work. The homeless were 
promptly housed, and in many a palace the in- 
mates retired to the three rooms allowed to them 
by law. The British Labor Party announced as 
its motto at the last election, "No cake for any 
till all have bread.' ' The billeting plans of the 
Hungarian Government were a drastic applica- 
tion of that principle. In practice it was carried 
out with reasonable consideration. Friends and 
relatives were encouraged to live together. On 
the amusing plea that the bourgeois would corrupt 
honest workers, families of the same habits of 
life were grouped together. A certain professor 
of the University, with a family of three, had five 
large rooms — two too many. One was allowed 
him as a study, and the official who dealt with his 
case suggested to him that he should bring his 
secretary to inhabit the fifth room. That illustra- 
tion exhibits the policy of the administration. It 
was friendly to men and women of the middle class 
who contributed anything to society by their work. 
If it was inclined to be harsh, it was only to the 
idle and unproductive rich. Clothing was no less 
scarce than house-room, and no new stocks could 



18 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

be imported. In each block of flats the tenants 
were required to elect trustees who must counter- 
sign their applications for new clothes or furni- 
ture and grant them only in case of actual need. 
These are only a few instances of the drastic 
measures which the People's Commissaries adop- 
ted to deal with an abnormal condition of scarcity. 
They make on the whole for the good of the great- 
est number. In nothing perhaps did the Com- 
missioners act so firmly as in the instant and 
total prohibition of all alcoholic drink. There is 
no evasion of that command. Hungary is obedi- 
ently "dry," and to this even more than to the 
firmly disciplined Eed Guards it owes order. 
This prohibition of drink involved a drastic med- 
dling with social habits. In some other respects, 
however, the Government showed a prudent mod- 
eration. Though it forbade priests and pastors 
to preach on political questions, it was prompt in 
stopping any attacks of its own too anti-clerical 
supporters upon the religious liberty of the 
Church. It also postponed (after publishing a 
draft edict) legislation for the reform of marriage 
and divorce. Headers who may have heard the 
far from amusing joke that Bolsheviks "nation- 
alize women" will be interested to learn that they 
closed the brothels of Budapest. Prostitution, as 
Bela Kun put it, is a typical institution of capital- 
ism. Their most unpopular measure was prob- 
ably the requisitioning of all jewels and plate, over 
a. certain minimum value. That was done pri- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 19 

marily to provide an article of export, or a basis 
for credit, so soon as the blockade should be lifted 
and trade resumed. "Liquid' ' private property, 
in the shape of bank balances, was not confiscated 
when the banks were nationalized, but a limit of 
2,000 kronen (£25 at the exchange then ruling) 
per month was placed on the amount which might 
be drawn from any one account. That was a 
tactical measure, designed to hinder the free use 
of wealth for counter-revolutionary designs. 

The test question for any form of Socialism in 
Hungary lies beyond the boundaries of the towns. 
They were ripe for the change. The rural popu- 
lation, however, was still conservative and clerical. 
The younger peasants may have been shaken 
somewhat out of the conservatism of their class 
by the war, but their elders, half of them illiterate, 
cling tenaciously to the idea of private ownership. 
The former Government proposed to break up the 
vast latifundia into small farms, and on Count 
Karolyi's own estate the partition had actually 
begun. Socialism could have no future outside 
the towns if that policy were carried out, and the 
peasants would necessarily form a preponderant 
conservative propertied class. Everywhere in 
Eastern Europe the day of the big feudal land- 
lord is over, but whether he shall be succeeded 
by the small peasant owner is not yet settled. 
In Prussia, the half-Socialist Government has 
shirked the question, and has given the owners 
of big estates two years in which to break them 



20 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

up voluntarily without legislative interference. 
In Poland the Socialists do not venture to oppose 
the individualist peasant program. In Russia, 
though a law of nationalization has been enacted, 
it has been found impossible to cope with the peas- 
ant instinct of ownership, and in practice national- 
ization differs little from a system of small hold- 
ings. In Hungary the Socialists were more alive 
to the danger of multiplying owners, and they 
had contrived during the winter to delay the exe- 
cution of the Karolyi program of compulsory 
subdivision. They held that the big estates in 
Hungary, often leased to limited companies, would 
lend themselves readily to a system of communal 
ownership and co-operative working. Even be- 
fore the Revolution the Socialists in some counties 
started an active campaign of education among 
the landless workers of the great estates. The 
argument was simple and convincing. One might 
divide the land but one could not break up the im- 
mense model cattle-sheds with their perfect equip- 
ment. I saw some of these estates in Somogy 
County. There was electric light and hygi- 
enic drainage in the byres; the workers' cottages 
had neither. Then if gains must be shared under 
communism, so also must risks, and the Hungarian 
peasant has reason to dread the sudden local 
storms of hail. He readily understood the case 
for communizing engines and steam plows, and 
even before the Revolution, on one great estate 
near Kaposvar the laborers, under the influence 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 21 

of the local Socialist party, themselves formed a 
co-operative society to work the estate, instead 
of subdividing it. 

In any event the peasants realized that the end 
of March was no time for a destructive experi- 
ment, for the fields called for the sower. In the 
first days of the Revolution a plan of organiza- 
tion was rapidly worked out by the Commissioner 
for Agriculture, Dr. Hamburger, a country doctor 
with a high record for revolutionary courage, who 
stepped out of prison like so many of his col- 
leagues, to wield a dictator's power. 1 On each 
great estate over 200 acres (the limit is only pro- 
visional, and may vary in each district) the entire 
working staff from steward to milkmaid is formed 
into a permanent guild or society. The only con- 
dition of membership is the obligation to work 
at least 120 days in the year — a low minimum 
which is intended to lure the neighboring owners 

i During the winter of 1917-18, Dr. Hamburger was in com- 
mand of a Red Cross contingent, in a small town behind the 
line of the Italian front, which happened to be a vital railway- 
junction. During the Brest negotiations, when Trotsky called 
on the workers of the Central Powers to strike, Dr. Hamburger 
was the first to respond. He had great influence with the men 
of his own contingent, and also with the railway workers. Not 
only did they give the signal for the strike (which the Socialists 
of Vienna promptly obeyed ) , they even proclaimed a local Soviet 
Government in their area, and for some time held up the military 
communications, by way of compelling the Austro-Hungarian 
Government to make a peace on the basis of " no annexations, no 
indemnities." When the movement was suppressed, Dr. Ham- 
burger, in spite of a promise to the contrary, was arrested and 
imprisoned until the Revolution released him. 



22 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

of small "uneconomic" holdings (as half-time 
workers) into these agricultural guilds. The 
maintenance of the workers is a first charge upon 
the produce of the communal farm. Each family 
will receive a ration of grain, meat, dairy produce, 
and vegetables according to the number of its mem- 
bers. The surplus product is then bought by the 
district central agricultural association, which is 
in its turn subordinate to a county association, 
and to the Ministry. 

In these new organizations there are centralized 
the purchase of seeds, manures, machines, and the 
sale of produce to the town populations of Hun- 
gary. This centralization will make for economy 
and efficiency in all the industries subsidiary to 
agriculture, from the making of butter to the 
manufacture of beet sugar. It will be an obliga- 
tion on the societies to expend half of each year's 
surplus on improvements — a term which covers 
the building of decent dwellings for the working 
members of the society as well as the purchase of 
machinery. The remaining half of the surplus is 
distributed in time wages to the working members 
of the community, and is the inducement which 
will stimulate them to work their best for as many 
days in the year as possible. I had a full oppor- 
tunity, during a memorable visit to the little 
county town and district of Kaposvar, of seeing 
all these novel institutions in the company of Dr. 
Hamburger, during the first weeks of the experi- 
ment. It is a rich and smiling country, of rolling; 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 23 

hills, deep pasture, and pleasant woodland. The 
meadows on these April days w T ere gay with cow- 
slips and ladies' smocks. We drove from farm 
to farm in a " socialized" carriage which had be- 
longed to the absentee millionaire noble, who 
owned half the county. I could see that all the 
mechanism of these great estates was running 
smoothly, from the dairies, the breeding studs, and 
light railway to the clean, well-tilled fields, with 
the wheat already in vigorous growth. I wit- 
nessed the immense popularity of Dr. Hamburger 
in the little town, and found among the officials 
of local agricultural organization several who 
talked English, French, or German, and explained 
to me all their far-reaching plans for the improve- 
ment of buildings, roads, light railways and manu- 
facturing processes. One of them, by the way, 
was a ci-devant Count, whose Socialism had led 
him long ago to give up his own lands, and to 
work with his own hands as a laborer. The little 
town seethed with ambition, hope, and enthusiasm, 
and every one believed that they would soon realize 
all the predictions of Kropotkin, by enhancing the 
productivity of the soil. My ignorance of Mag- 
yar was, however, a fatal handicap in preventing 
me from talking directly to the peasants. Enthu- 
siasts are rarely good judges of other people's 
state of mind, and I discounted what the Socialists 
themselves told me. I was, however, lucky in 
finding an intelligent man who spoke German, who 
retained his strong individualist opinion, and had 



24 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

been the leader of the local peasant-owners' oppo- 
sition to Socialism. I asked him what the laborers 
were thinking. He summed up their view as fol- 
lows ; ' ' They care nothing for the theory or ideals 
of Socialism, but they are attracted by the prom- 
ises of the leaders. At present they are disposed 
to work heartily and will give the experiment a 
chance. If these promises are kept, if they see 
new and healthy cottages built, if they get what 
they never had before, free medical attendance 
and well-organized schools, if they see that the 
former gains of the absentee capitalist-landlord 
are flowing into their own pockets, they will re- 
main firm supporters of the system." From a 
hostile but capable witness this was favorable 
testimony. 

The constitution of these rural workers' guilds 
reflects the wisdom hardly gained from the early 
experience of Bolshevik Eussia. The autonomy 
of the workers allows them a certain initiative and 
control, but the final authority is the central 
bureaucracy. Each estate (they average 10,000 to 
20,000 acres) elects its own workers' soviet, and 
this in turn chooses a managing committee of 
three. Side by side with this elected authority 
there is, however, a manager appointed by the 
district organization. He is usually the bailiff 
of the old aristocratic landlord. These men were 
experts, and against all the traditions of their 
class they have rallied to Socialism. Feudalism 
received its death-blow in the war. The alterna- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 25 

tive was the partition of the estates among* the 
laborers. That would have meant the end of the 
stewards' profession, and to-day one may see 
these men, with their half-aristocratic, half -para- 
sitic manners, wearing a red button in their coats, 
and serving their new masters with all their ha- 
bitual correctitude. The steward has the right to 
veto the decisions of the elected authority, and 
all its plans and budgets go with his independent 
reports to the omnipotent central authority. 

Agriculture in these vast estates is already a 
typical modern industry, which dominated a rural 
proletariat by the power of its concentrated capi- 
tal. This field is ripe for socialization. Outside 
it lies the antique world of the peasant — a term 
which covers the small farmer who hires labor, 
the peasant who makes a living by the labor of 
his family from his own ten acres, and finally the 
struggling small-holder who gains a half-exist- 
ence from his own inadequate plot, and ekes it 
out by his work as a hireling for richer men. 
Towards this intensely conservative peasant 
world the policy of Communist Hungary will be 
the minimum of interference. There will be in 
the villages no socialization of houses or of land. 
The small owner will struggle on as before. If 
he is adaptable, he will himself create a voluntary 
co-operative system. If he is conservative, he 
will fail to compete with the great industry of 
the socialized estates. He will have to pay a fixed 
minimum wage for his hired labor, and if all goes 



26 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

well, the attraction of life on these comfortable 
self-governing estates will raise the requirements 
of his hands. He will hardly survive this genera- 
tion, but meanwhile the intention is that no village 
shall be "socialized" until it calls for the change. 
The lesson of Russia has been learned. One can- 
not force the pace of a peasant's thinking. 1 His 
mind, however, will be formed in the next genera- 
tion in the village schools. They were the strong- 
hold of the Church. They are now the advance- 
posts of the Socialist State. 

Industry has been reorganized on similar lines. 
Like the absentee landlord, the sleeping partner 
and the shareholder disappear without compensa- 
tion. As a rule the capitalist, who himself con- 
ducted his own business, remains at the maximum 
monthly salary recognized by communism (3,000 
kronen), as a consulting expert. A People's Com- 
missioner (Minister) receives no more. In mines 
and factories, in so far as the lack of raw ma- 

i In spite of this cautious policy I gather that the communist 
state has had grave difficulties with the peasants. As in Russia, 
our blockade tells fatally against the experiment. The peasant 
finds that there is nothing to buy- in exchange for his produce. 
He receives paper for it, but paper will purchase little, partly 
because nothing can be imported and partly because local in- 
dustries are lamed for lack of raw materials. As a result, 
it has become very difficult to provision Budapest, which in 
April was not really, when compared with Vienna, or even with 
Berlin, seriously short of food. The city lives on the country, 
but the city unable to work has nothing to give in exchange. 
There is no cure for this state of things until the blockade is 
lifted. The blockade, of course, is maintained with the deliberate 
intention of destroying a Socialist experiment. 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 27 

terials due to the blockade allows them to work, 
the men elect their own soviet, as in the rural 
guilds. It is a small body with a maximum of 
seven members. It nominates a manager, but he re- 
ceives his definite appointment from the Ministry 
of Production, which alone is competent to dismiss 
him. As in the country, so in the urban indus- 
tries, this constitution shows a balance of author- 
ity. The workers have a vastly larger sphere of 
self-government than the most liberal form of 
capitalism allowed, but the final authority lies 
with the state. It is the Central Soviet Govern- 
ment, and not the Factory Council, which fixes 
the scale of wages. There is no risk that the ex- 
travagant period of self-indulgence which ruined 
industry in the early days of Eussian communism 
will be repeated in Hungary. There it is undoubt- 
edly intelligence which rules. I visited a great 
factory at Budapest, one of the biggest and best 
of its kind in Europe, which makes electric lamps, 
telephones, and telegraphic apparatus. The soviet 
consisted of three scientific and four manual work- 
ers, including a woman, and its function was 
mainly to deal with cases of discipline. The 
manager was a former engineer of the works, 
a man, obviously, of ability and good sense. Three 
former directors were employed, at high salaries, 
as consultative experts : the other three, who had 
been mere financiers, ceased to be connected with 
the works. All the infinitely skilful work of this 
vast organism went on as before, with this differ- 



28 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

ence, however, on which workmen and managers 
both insisted, that men and women alike worked 
with more spirit, more conscience, more honesty 
than before. As usual in Budapest, a fair propor- 
tion of the workmen of all grades spoke German, 
and I talked with several of them. They all said 
the same thing, each in his own way. "We feel 
that the place belongs to us now." "We are 
working for ourselves and not for an exploiter. ,, 
So far from taking less pride in their work, they 
took more. I saw a telephonic switchboard of a 
new automatic pattern which one of the men had 
just invented. The model had been made since 
the Eevolution, and the factory was proud to think 
that it would better its past record. "What 
strikes me most," said an English engineer from 
Birmingham, who had worked in this factory for 
eleven years, "is that all the little dishonesties 
of the past have stopped. The men have a keener 
conscience in their work." In point of fact, the 
output of the factory, which had fallen off seri- 
ously during the misery and unrest of the Karolyi 
period, was rising again, and rapidly nearing the 
pre-war standard. None the less, I think the Com- 
missioners (Ministers) must have been anxious 
lest production should, generally, drop. They 
were proposing to introduce not only piecework 
but the Taylor system. 

After three weeks one cannot speak of the 
achievements of Hungarian Communism ; one can 
only describe its plans. Of these the most ambi- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 29 

tious center around education. The Minister, or 
Commissioner, Dr. Lukacs, a former lecturer in 
philosophy at Heidelberg, combines imagination 
with courage. He means to achieve this immense 
end, that culture shall cease to be the privilege of 
a class. The drudges of the old world, the teach- 
ers, have suddenly become the most honored serv- 
ants of the state, and even the village school- 
master will receive the maximum salary of 3,000 
crowns a month. A uniform salary is to be paid to 
all teachers, from the university to the village 
school. The school age will be raised to sixteen 
and presently to eighteen years, and every boy and 
girl will have such further education, technical or 
scientific, as his capacity may merit. Dr. Lukacs 
hopes to recruit his corps of teachers from the 
ranks of the academically educated men and 
women, especially the lawyers, whom the Revolu- 
tion ' has placed temporarily among the unem- 
ployed. Meanwhile, he is organizing courses 
which will enable the more capable adult manual 
workers to fit themselves for scientific work. One 
year will be spent at the charge of the state in 
completing their general education, and thereafter 
they will follow specialized courses in engineering, 
architecture, or chemistry. The intention is to 
break down the barrier which has confined the pro- 
letarian to the routine work of his craft. 

This is not all. Artists whose achievement de- 
serves the distinction, will, by a vote of a college 
of their peers, be maintained at the public charge 



30 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

to continue their productive work. To me, I con- 
fess, this scheme seems a deplorable and thought- 
less check upon the artists' liberty and individu- 
ality. This Academy might begin in a revolution- 
ary mood, but it must soon become a clique intol- 
erant of any merit which deviates from its stand- 
ards. The results for all the arts, for literature 
and for pioneer thought in science or philosophy, 
must be equally unfortunate, unless in some way 
a free career is opened to individual talent. Pic- 
tures of high merit in private ownership have been 
"socialized," and four hundred of them added to 
the nation's collections. The theaters, and even 
the cinemas, are also socialized, and Dr. Lukacs 
has boldly suppressed the more trivial type of 
performance, and raised the standard of the Buda- 
pest repertories, while lowering the price of the 
seats to workmen. Two plays by Bernard Shaw 
were being acted while I was in Budapest, and 
both of them were crowded. The policy of the 
Govermnent is to please the masses by offering 
them the fullest satisfaction of their esthetic ca- 
pacities. The amazing and creditable thing is that 
in music, and in the theater, it insists on a high 
standard, which the untrained mass will certainly 
find exacting. Here too, as in the schools, there is 
work for the expropriated class. One has heard 
it said of Soviet Russia, that at one stage of the 
Revolution educated men and women were re- 
duced to selling matches or newspapers in the 
streets. If that were true, it would be a condem- 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 31 

nation of the whole spirit of the system. Hun- 
gary, on the other hand, was eager to find work 
for its " intellectuals.' ' 

This picture of Hungary in the first weeks of 
social revolution would be false if it failed to em- 
phasize the fact that the government is an un- 
mixed dictatorship. There is no liberty for the 
Press, or for any political agitation or organiza- 
tion outside the Socialist ranks. The old news- 
papers all continue to appear, but they all play 
the correct official tune. 1 No criticism even of de- 
tails is tolerated, and even in the churches, priests 
and pastors are forbidden to touch on politics. It 
is true that an election has been held to constitute 
the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils. The fran- 
chise includes every productive worker, manual 
or intellectual, with women occupied in the house- 
hold tasks of their families. A large percentage 
of those who vote are men and women who used 
in the old days to rank in the "middle class." 
Excluded are all who do no productive work, all 
who live by the toil of others, and (rather 
strangely) the clergy. Work in the Socialist 
State is the only source of value, and Communism 

i There were, I believe, two exceptions, one of them a weekly 
feminist paper and the other a monthly review, which were 
allowed considerable latitude. Lenin is fond of saying that the 
liberty of the press is a bourgeois ideal, conceived in the inter- 
ests of capital: it means the domination of opinion by wealth. 
In Russia, non-Bolshevik parties, which have ceased to attempt 
to overthrow the Soviet regime by force, are now being licensed, 
one by one, and allowed to set up their own daily press. They 
are tolerated, in short, when they cease to be a danger, 



32 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

has its own political adaptation of the Pauline 
maxim: if a man will not work neither shall he 
vote. The exclusion tells harshly where it strikes 
at the small farmer, or the owner of a little work- 
shop (the smaller businesses are not "social- 
ized"), who all work as managers, though they 
also employ and often exploit others. The fran- 
chise is, however, only a temporary grievance: 
this excluded class will soon be absorbed in the 
general body of workers. What admits of no de- 
fense is the method of election, which was carried 
out under a state of siege in which no opposition 
could organize effectively. In each district from 
sixty to eighty members had to be chosen. The 
lists were prepared by the Socialist party caucus, 
and though one might strike out names, this per- 
mission was of no practical use. Eival lists were 
rarely presented, and even then offered only a 
narrow choice. The voting was on the majority, 
not the proportional system, and of course, the of- 
ficial list everywhere triumphed. It would have 
been an honester course to allow the party to 
nominate the Soviets without the pretense of 
election. 

A temporary dictatorship of this type may be 
defended as a necessary expedient during a sharp, 
brief crisis. The excuse for it is that the Entente, 
by the blockade and by its encouragement of 
counter-revolutionary emigres, was actively work- 
ing against the Eevolution. It will destroy Hun- 
gary intellectually and morally if it is continued 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 33 

for more than a very few months. It is not in fact 
so much the " dictatorship of the proletariat' ' as 
the dictatorship of a single party, which happens 
to be the one political organization in Hungary 
that has survived the war. A country which has 
never known even a distant approach to democ- 
racy does not resent it as a western people would 
do. It should be noted, however, that the control 
by the Soviets, once elected by this rather unsat- 
isfactory process, over the Commissioners, was 
adequate, and much firmer than that of most 
Parliaments over Ministers. There is certainly 
no force outside the Socialist Party which can 
overthrow it. The landlords and capitalists lack 
the numbers : the peasants have neither the arms 
nor the organization. If freedom is to emerge in 
the near future, it can come, after the foreign 
enemy has ceased to meddle and blockade, only by 
a spontaneous movement from within the Socialist 
movement itself. 

I should convey a false impression if I allowed 
the reader to suppose that the men who are actu- 
ally working this dictatorship regard it as any- 
thing but a momentary phase, a necessary evil en- 
dured for the rapid achievement of a great end. 
Behind the men of action who really made the 
Revolution, there stood a most interesting group 
of thinkers and writers who call themselves (after 
Galileo) the Galileans. Their passion is intellec- 
tual freedom. One of them, a man who talked with 
rare distinction and a touch of genius (he is a 



34 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

high official of the new regime) explained his po- 
sition thus : " I am not, in my ultimate view of life, 
a Socialist, or a Communist. We Galileans have 
gone beyond the materialism of Marx. But we 
realize that the destruction of the capitalist sys- 
tem is the first condition for the world's freedom 
of thought. We shall carry that out, with ruthless 
logic. We shall tolerate anything in the interval 
save a sabotage of the intellect." "But," said I, 
"surely this Dictatorship, which destroys all criti- 
cism even of details, which forbids liberty of 
speech, press, association, is just such sabotage?" 
"It will be," he answered, "if it goes on too long. 
It is we intellectuals who suffer most severely from 
it, for it is our free thinking that it represses, but 
we are ready to endure it — for a time. It is neces- 
sary only so long as we dread overthrow by the 
Entente. Save us from that, and we will instantly 
create full liberty. " "But tell me, " I asked, ' < are 
you really at ease ? Is there no predatory element 
in all this Communising? How many of the Ked 
Army are idealists, and how many are robbers?" 
"Christ," came the answer, "was crucified be- 
tween two thieves. There is a criminal instinct in 
all societies, in all men. Capitalism legalized it, 
confined it, dug channels of profiteering for it. 
Our task is to destroy it, by evolving a stronger 
social passion. Shall we succeed? Sometimes I 
think we are nearing such a time as the Eoman 
Empire passed through in the barbarian inva- 
sions, The war has shattered more than the 



IN COMMUNIST HUNGARY 35 

Central Empires. It has shattered society itself. 
Only a new faith, a new principle can save it. We 
Galileans mean to work like one of the old religi- 
ous orders, with obedience, asceticism, poverty. 
No lesser effort, no uninspiring compromise could 
save us. Perhaps we shall fail. Perhaps civili- 
zation will go under. We know the risks. " 

This hasty sketch of an immense effort is based 
on the firm belief that Communism, as I have seen 
it in Hungary, is a principle of constructive order, 
which errs rather on the side of excessive author- 
ity than on the side of anarchy. Its makers are 
men of action, who have taken into partnership 
with them some thinkers and students whose ability 
and disinterestedness no one questions. The test 
of the system will be in its ability to work — at 
first without adequate public criticism — an im- 
mense governing machine efficiently and without 
corruption. For the moment it promises well. 
The energy, the faith, the will are there. Without 
its adventurous experiment, a sick society, robbed 
of all social and historical ambition, must have 
vegetated and rotted under the conditions of 
strangulation imposed by the victors, as unhappy 
Austria will vegetate and rot. Bela Kun may have 
his successor as leader. 1 The Socialist Party 

1 As I am passing the proofs, comes the news of Bela Kun's 
fall. For three months his government had been engaged in 
incessant war with the Tchecho-Slovaks and the Roumanians 
who have acted as the army of the allies. Victorious over the 
former, it fell when the latter were within twenty miles of 
Budapest. A purely Social Democratic Cabinet, pledged to 
maintain the accomplished measures of socialization, but also 



36 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

may evolve in various tendencies. But short of 
a violent external intervention, an attack organ- 
ized in Paris by Eoumanians or Tchechs, the great 
estates, the large factories and the banks, are as 
little likely as the posts and the railways to revert 
to private ownership. At a heavy cost to per- 
sonal liberty, and with much inevitable hardship 
to individuals, the immense transformation has 
been achieved, without disorder, by a single 
stroke. If freedom is eclipsed for a moment, the 
destruction of the capitalist system makes for the 
first time in a modern state the only condition 
under which real autonomy is conceivable, whether 
for the will or for the intellect. Hungary builds 
upon ruins, but the authors of the destruction 
were the makers of the war. To chaos and despair 
a living idea has brought the stimulus of a cre- 
ative hope. 

Vienna, April 21, 1919. 

to call a Constituent Assembly, has succeeded the mixed Socialist- 
Communist regime. It can be only a brief transitional phase, 
leading to further reaction under further foreign pressure. 



II 

IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 

I had wondered, not without anxiety, what it would 
feel like to be in an enemy country. Should I meet 
with stiff and resentful pride, or would the 
attitude be an even more painful cringing? It 
is neither of these things. Here in Vienna a na- 
tion which has made its bloodless Republican revo- 
lution believes with a pathetic simplicity in the 
fraternity of peoples. The chambermaid in my 
hotel gave me the watchword this morning. She 
came in smiling with a reminder that this was elec- 
tion day. In two minutes she had told me that she 
was going to vote Socialist. "Does it feel 
strange, ' ' I asked, * ' to talk to an enemy V " No, ' ' 
she answered promptly, "the people has no ene- 
mies/ ' and then followed the inevitable sentence 
which I have heard all day long from almost every 
one whom I met. "The people is not guilty of 
this war; the people did not want the war." As 
a Socialist Deputy put it, "There were perhaps 
ten thousand people among Austria's fifty millions 
who welcomed the war, and most of them were 
profiteers." Wherever I have gone during this 
momentous day in Austria's history, in the com- 
mittee rooms of the Socialist candidates, the of- 

37 



38 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

fices of the Socialist newspaper, and the big 
"Workers Home" or club-house of the central 
district, I had only to introduce myself as a 
foreign comrade to be accorded a welcome, and 
when I added that I am an Englishman there came 
a reassuring pressure of the hand. 

Is it true, as we have all heard, for many weeks, 
that Austria is starving? As I crossed the fron- 
tier from relatively prosperous Switzerland, I was 
doubtful. There seemed at first to be plenty of 
food, rather nasty and very dear, in the station 
restaurants. Smuggling no doubt was easy. The 
train crawled slowly through the Tyrolese valleys, 
incredibly beautiful in their decorations of snow. 
There was ample time to read the local news- 
papers. The lack of coal has meant that express 
trains have ceased to run, and ours went at less 
than the speed of a London electric train. The 
first thing that caught my eye were the advertise- 
ments in the Socialist organ of Innsbruck. Would 
any one exchange a few sacks of coal for gold, cig- 
arettes or tobacco? Had any one a little stout 
leather, or warm woolen stuff for a child's dress 
that they would give for a pair of golden ear- 
rings? In every newspaper that I picked up, the 
staring salient advertisements were for dealings 
in jewelry or furs. The middle-class is selling 
its luxuries for food. I turned to the election 
news in these local Tyrolese papers. Slander was 
painfully prominent, but the only mud which 
seemed to stick was a charge relating to food. 



IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 39 

The Clericals accused the Socialists of underhand 
practices in distributing flour; the Socialists re- 
torted with a shower of disconcerting facts. As 
I walked down one of the central streets of Vienna 
to-day, an army aeroplane, flying just above the 
roofs, dropped a little cloud of leaflets. They ex- 
posed the dealings of certain Hapsburg Arch- 
dukes who are said to have distinguished them- 
selves as monopolists in food or milk or as army 
contractors. On the surface of this people's mind 
there are only two preoccupations ; the first is food, 
and the second is coal. It wants no close observa- 
tion to mark the lack of coal, even after a few 
hours' sojourn. In our main-line train, the only 
Continental "express," crawling along at about 
ten miles an hour, the conductor came round at 
nightfall to apologize for turning on the gas only 
at half-pressure. Walking down the platform at 
the next stop, I saw that in the third-class carri- 
ages, crammed like a London tube with standing 
passengers, no lights at all were lit. Even in this 
good hotel the sitting-rooms are chilly, the light 
barely suffices to read large print, and hot water 
is obtainable only in limited quantities within 
stated hours. Bread, of course, is severely ra- 
tioned, at the rate of a half -kilogram (about 1% 
lb.) weekly. As one got it in the hotel, the portion 
amounted for the whole day to three slices of the 
long Viennese loaf, or about one moderately thick 
slice of an ordinary English loaf. Milk, butter, 
and cheese were in my experience unobtainable 



40 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

even in the best hotels and restaurants. Potatoes 
one could occasionally get in a good hotel, but for 
the working class they had entirely disappeared. 
Working-class families could get rationed meat 
once a week, but no oftener: the rich bought it 
from smugglers, but at fantastic prices. 1 

Discomfort in the big hotel means starvation in 
the worker's garret. In the Socialist club of the 
"Favoriten" quarter I met the local Deputy for 
the Provincial Diet. He was good enough to take 
me round his constituency. The streets were filled 
with a rather dreary crowd, for the famous gaiety 
of Vienna is a distant memory. The clothes of the 
working class are manifestly faded and old, and 
one sees none of the cheap finery that strolls west- 
wards from our East End on Sunday. Patches 
are so common that they look like a local fashion. 
The children and the poorer workers clatter along 
on wooden soles, for leather is the luxury of the 
rich. The faces of the women and the children 
are of any tint from yellow and gray to ashy white, 
and their lips suggest that nearly every one is 
anemic. I have seen such lips before among ref- 
ugees in the Balkans. All- Central Europe has 
been Balkanized to-day. We walked past gigantic 
blocks of modern flats, by no means tasteless as 
architecture. I asked my guide about the housing 
conditions. One-roomed dwellings, usually with 
a little unlit vestibule, are the rule, and the "cabi- 

1 Returning to Vienna in April, I found it in its fourth con- 
secutive meatless week. 



IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 41 

nets' ' (I should prefer to call them cells) are 
sometimes no more than 12 feet by 6. My guide, 
whom every one greeted as we passed, took me 
into some of these dwellings, choosing them at 
random. The usual Austrian politeness and good 
nature made the conversation easy, though I had 
sometimes to ask for a translation into polite Ger- 
man of the broad Viennese dialect. 

In one of the larger rooms was a family of four, 
a widower and three boys. A tall man, perhaps 
sixty years of age, stood in the ragged clothes that 
once were respectable, among the remains of his 
furniture. The carpet was gone. A bedstead re- 
mained. The bedding consisted of straw with 
something that looked like a horse-blanket eked 
out by sacks. He was a mason by trade, and in 
Austria, as elsewhere, building had ceased long 
ago. How did he live? The City pays six crowns 
a day to every unemployed man, with an extra 
crown for each member of the family. The daily 
income of this household was accordingly ten 
crowns. The crown used to be worth a fraction 
over a franc. Its exchange value is now about 
three pence. I was trying hard to imagine what 
this could mean in terms of food, when one of the 
boys came in with the evening meal, the Sunday 
treat, from the nearest national kitchen. A frag- 
ment of meat, probably horse, lay in the pan with 
a fairly generous supply of gravy, and a dump- 
ling of meal, which is the usual substitute for a 
potato. The meat was, I should guess, about one- 



42 ACROSS THE BLOCKADP: 

sixth of a pound, certainly less than a quarter. 
The cost of this banquet was four crowns and sixty- 
heller (cents), and it had to be shared among one 
man and three boys. It would leave about half 
the day's income intact. The old man poured out 
a long story. His eldest boy, he assured me, was 
a gifted artist, and moreover he had learned 
French and Tchech. He would have gone to col- 
lege, if his father had been able to earn his good 
pre-war wages. The admiring brothers brought 
out a big portfolio of his sketches, and the irrele- 
vant water colors, like the wrack of Austria's ar- 
tistic past, fluttered on to the bare floor and the 
straw that covered the bed. Now that boy 
will become a day-laborer — if Austria can buy 
labor. 1 

In another flat was a family of nine. The man, 
who had just been demobilized, looked stout and 
well-fed, but he could find no work. The children 
had the familiar transparently white skin of 
anemia. Only one of the nine earns anything, a 
"young person" as our legislators would call her, 
who receives 30 kronen a week (say 7s. 6d.) in a 
factory. How did they live'? Chiefly, I gathered, 
from daily portions of their soup and a slice of 
bread supplied in the public kitchens to the desti- 
tute. One family talked of the dearness of boots, 
even with wooden soles. Another reminded me 

i Five months later the Austrian government is writing beg- 
ging letters to its victors. The blockade is lifted, but it lacks 
the means to buy raw materials, and without them, no work can 
begin. 



IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 43 

that a sausage which used to cost four heller 
(cents) before the war is now worth four crowns. 
None of these, I should say, were habitually de- 
graded families. Their style of speaking, their 
quiet good manners, and the relics here and there 
of past possessions stamped them as victims of 
something less than lifelong penury. "I hope one 
day to become a human being again/ ' was the ter- 
rible phrase which one woman used of herself. In 
round figures my guide, the Deputy, told me that 
there are now 100,000 unemployed workers in 
Vienna. That means about half a million men, 
women, and children in a population of two mil- 
lions. Figures tell little, but one figure which 
came from the house-porter of one of these blocks 
of flats needs no comment. In his barrack, with 
its sixty-two one-roomed dwellings, there were 
thirty-four war-widows. 

Literal starvation, in this city, which is even 
shorter of coal than of food, would have been the 
general fate had it not been for the public kitch- 
ens. I watched the distribution at one of these 
to-day. The queue had been standing for two 
hours when I arrived, and still there were from 
three to four hundred waiting to be served. Most 
of them were more or less ragged: all were in 
very old clothes. What struck me most about 
them was the contrast between the personal clean- 
liness and tidiness of the women and the poverty 
of their attire. A woman who had done up her 
hair with an elaboration which we in England 



44 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

would think coquettish and excessive would be 
wearing a shawl or a pair of boots in the last 
stages of decomposition. The raggedness, I con- 
cluded, proceeds not from lack of care or self- 
respect, but from sheer penury. Some ate their 
portions at tables; the majority carried them 
home. The meal consisted of one plate of soup or a 
soup of mixed vegetables. Both were almost wholly 
lacking in fat. A strange-looking thing called meat 
was added. It was, in fact, a sort of rissole, which 
looked like meat in the sense that it was solid 
and brown. The proportion of meat in it would 
not have soiled the conscience of a vegetarian. A 
single portion of this dish cost 4d., a double por- 
tion, twice as much (8d.). I suppose this portion 
would just keep a man alive, if he were reasonably 
idle. In point of fact most of these dinners went 
home, which meant that one portion, single or 
double, was the day's food for a family of several 
persons. 

That is the diet of those workers who can still 
pay. There is a free distribution from soup kitch- 
ens to those who are wholly destitute. This free 
soup is doled out in half -liters, without meat or 
bread, and as the cook sadly confessed to me, there 
is no fat in it at all. On cabbage day it must be 
nearly valueless as nourishment ; on haricot days 
it should be sustaining. It is, however, for most 
of these people their only hot meal in the twenty- 
four hours. I stood and talked to a group of boys 
who survived upon it. All of them had that ter- 



IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 46 

ribly white transparent skin which means severe 
anemia. All of them were wearing men's dis- 
carded boots tied together with string. I made 
them show me the soles. All of them were in pulp. 

One only of the Tour had reasonably warm clothes 
(it was ten degrees below zero three nights ago), 
and that was because he had luckily obtained an 
old infantry uniform whieh hung about him like a 
drooping flag on a pole. Under the rags in which 
these children are clad peeps out the ashen-white 
skin tightly stretched over the bones. They live 

still, chiefly because they possess the tradition of 

this once gay city, which jokes as it tightens its 

belt. As I turned away, the boys began to laugh 
at some private joke of their own. "Well, what 
is it?" I asked. "Wir sind Wiener Kinder," was 
the answer of the brightest of them. They culti- 
vate laughter on a very little oatmeal. 

The crisis, one may say, is over. Has not Mr. 
Hoover undertaken to supply grain enough to 
continue the present exiguous ration of bread I 
That is true, but on the other hand Vienna is about 
to enter on a period of meatless weeks. The 
Tcheeho-Slovaks have now been shamed into al- 
lowing coal for Vienna to cross their railways. 
The fact remains that German- Austria cannot 
buy, for it has nothing to export. It lived on the 
coal of Bohemia, the wheat of Croatia and the 
meat of Hungary, and now it stands alone. For 
the factories and metal works of Vienna there is 
neither raw material nor market. It used to live 



46 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

by exchange with all the Hapsburg Dominions. 
Its territory for supply and demand is now 
shrunken to a fraction. Until the blockade is 
raised, no commerce can begin, and even then, 
until a substantial foreign loan permits the resto- 
ration of the worthless paper-currency, it is idle 
to talk of foreign trade. 

Is the popular saying true, that the nation was 
guiltless of the war? Perhaps there was a mad 
week or two, which all would now forget, when 
the Viennese middle-class crowd, well-fed, well- 
dressed, and gay as was its wont, cheered the 
troops departing for the front. It has repented 
of that folly. No one could doubt that, who reads 
the electioneering placards and fly-sheets. Yester- 
day along the railway line, young soldiers, still in 
uniform, stood beside our train, silently holding 
up their party standards. One was a simple ap- 
peal to "vote red." Another was a cry to the 
women voters, showing the figure of a mother 
mourning for her son. The third, w T hite on black, 
represented a file of skeletons beating a military 
drum, and the inscription: '-'They call to you to 
make an end of war. ' ' We in England have come 
through an election in which the chief reproach 
against a candidate was that he was a pacifist. 
Here in Austria the effort of every party is to 
proclaim itself pacifist. No one can dispute the 
claim of the Austrian Socialists ; they never com- 
promised over the war, or ceased demanding in- 
stant peace. They turn fiercely on Liberals and 



IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 47 

Clericals alike to remind them of their warlike 
past — their bellicose speeches, their early news- 
paper articles, their decorations, their profiteer- 
ing gains. The Liberals, or at least the strongest 
of their many groups (the middle-class Demo- 
crats), make, here and there, the pathetic attempt 
to discover among themselves a few genuine paci- 
fists, whom they place at the head of their lists. 
The real issue lies between Socialists and Cleri- 
cals, with the Democrats as a balancing force. 
The Socialists stand for the Republic, for pacifism, 
for war on the profiteer. The Clericals represent 
a sheeplike crowd of peasants and women, regi- 
mented by the clergy behind a peculiarly unscru- 
pulous group of financiers, courtiers, and large 
landowners. Though they do not openly cam- 
paign, for the restoration of the Monarchy, that 
is probably their secret dream, and though they 
also call for union with Germany, their zeal on this 
question is open to suspicion. In their manifes- 
toes, however, they pledge themselves both to the 
Republic and to Union. You will know the issue 
long before these lines appear in print. It cannot 
be a Clerical Majority. Any other result is a vic- 
tory for democracy and peace. 1 Austria is singu- 

1 The result was as I anticipated. The Socialist won a 
sweeping victory in Vienna, and did well in other industrial 
districts. The Clerical Party ("Christian-Socialists") carried 
the more backward rural districts. The Reichsrat is com- 
posed of 70 Socialists, 64 Clericals, and 78 others. The 
voting was, as in Germany and Poland by proportional repre- 
sentation, on the list system, with universal suffrage. Since no 



48 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

larly quiet and orderly to-day. To me it feels like 
the quiet of men too weak and anemic to move. 
Some said, when I expressed that opinion, "the 
quiet before the storm/ ' No nation will die with- 
out one despairing convulsion, and Austria is 
doomed to death 1 if the blockade continues for 

party had an absolute majority, a Coalition was formed from 
all three parties, but the Soeialists have all the chief offices, 
with Herr Seitz as President, Dr. Renner as Premier, Dr. Otto 
Bauer as Foreign Secretary, and Dr. Deutsch, a frank and attrac- 
tive personality, very popular with the soldiers, as War Minister. 
This party is well disciplined and well led, and its leaders are 
" intellectuals " to a much greater extent than in Germany. Its 
organ, the Arbeitcr Zcitung, is to-day a better newspaper than 
\ onciirts. The Left Wing is led by Dr. Fritz Adler, the son of 
Dr. Victor Adler, who assassinated the late Premier Stiirgkh. He 
is by far the most popular man in the movement, but though he 
differs little in theory from the Communists and the more radical 
of the German Independents, he remains loyally within the party 
and opposes revolutionary tactics. These Austrian Socialists 
have been singularly fortunate in their leaders, and contrive to 
preserve their unity, though the various shades of opinion are 
well marked. Dr. Bauer is the ablest of the more conservative 
" Evolutionary " section, but one rarely meets among Austrian 
Socialists the peculiarly wooden and almost obstructive conserva- 
tism which is painfully common in the German " Majority." 
Another crucial difference should be noted. There are no reac- 
tionary mercenary " Free Corps," in Austria, like those which 
Noske raised in Germany to crush the Spartacists. The only 
armed force is the " Volkswehr," a militia which is composed 
almost to a man (the officers included) of Socialist working-men. 
1 1 was able to obtain from official sources exact vital statistics 
for Vienna, but only for the year 1017. The figures for 1918 
must be very much worse. Comparing in every case the year 
1914 with the year 1917, I will select some salient facts. The 
number of children born alive fell from 36,000 to 19,000: deaths 
of children over five rose from 5,000 to 35,000: deaths between 
the ages of 50 and 70 rose from 8,000 to 13,000, and over 



IN HUNGER-STRICKEN AUSTRIA 49 

many weeks more. It is not enough, however, to 
raise the blockade, for bankrupt Austria cannot 
obtain raw materials, unless the Allies guarantee 
a loan. Paris, however, is discussing not loans but 

70 from 5,000 to 9,000: deaths from tuberculosis (due to the 
absence of fats) rose from 6,300 to 11,800. Almost all working- 
class children in Vienna over two years of age were rickety. 

Vienna was by no means the worst case. The Viennese 
medical authorities told me that Linz and the towns of German 
Bohemia were in a still more distressed condition. One of 
Mr. Hoover's investigators asked the children in a school of 
German Bohemia what they had had for breakfast. Out of 47 
children 12 had had absolutely nothing and 13 had had black 
substitute coffee and nothing else. Four only had milk with 
coffee: the rest had had a dish of wild herbs gathered in the 
fields. These were the Professors' children: the really poor 
children had neither boots nor clothes, and could not go to school 
at all. The lack of clothing was everywhere almost as serious 
as the lack of food. I saw children dressed in suits neatly made 
from sacks. In many hospitals children had to be wrapped in 
paper, for want of sheets and blankets. 

Germany was a little less miserable than Austria. None the 
less, this spring 30 per cent, of the children born to married 
mothers in Berlin died, and at Diisseldorf, according to the cor- 
respondent of the Morning Post, 85 per cent, of the babies 
perished for lack of milk. Professor Starling stated that before 
the war the average consumption of calories in England was 
3,600 per head daily: in Germany, after 1917, the average fell 
to 1,500. The German miners were in consequence of underfeed- 
ing able to produce only 40 per cent, of the pre-war output, and 
yet they had an extra ration. During one of the weeks of this 
June the City Council of Berlin stated that 700 cattle and 17 
swine were brought in to be slaughtered: the pre-war weekly 
average was between 5,000 and 6,000 cattle and 25,000 swine. 

In May the Swiss Colony in Germany, in a joint appeal to the 
Swiss Government, stated that 800 deaths per day in Germany 
were directly attributable to the blockade. The German official 
reckoning, based on the excess of deaths over pre-war averages, 



50 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

indemnitieB. One mighi as well levy an indemnity 
mi the inmates of a workhouse. 

Vienna, Februory 16, 1919. 

wns that 1,600,000 civilians ii.ni died in Germany and Austria 
as ii consequence <'i I he blocKade. 

Conditions In " Congress*" Poland were In reepect i<» food 
decidedly better than In Germany, but iii«' famine east of the 
Hutf wiih Immeasurably worse than anything to be found 
.1 ■;,-u here 

The raising of the blockade will i<':hI only very gradually and 
bIowIj i<» an Improvement In ii'<' food supply of Central Europe. 
The plain fact Is that with their currencies depreciated to a 
fourth and :> sixth of the old figure, Germany and Austria r;m 
afford i<> buy only the barest minimum of food from abroad. 
\,>r .-m they without oredit purchase raw materials, 'rims the 
resumption <>i industry is delayed, but even if they had anything 
to export, there are In most of the Allied markets embargoes Ln 
i ho way, which prohibit the Import of most of the German 
opecis ii Les 



Ill 

HUNGER AND REVOLUTION IN VIENNA 

The events in Vienna to-day (April), are a trifle 
in the civil war which breaks out spasmodically 
all over Central Europe. No field-guns were used, 
and the casualty only five killed and forty 

wounded. None the less the day had for me a 
deep and tragic interest. On a small scale one 
saw at work all the devils that have entered the 
distracted house of the defeated peoples. 

The Communists had called a series of open-air 
meetings for the unemployed, the returned prison- 
ers, and the disabled soldiers. On the steps of the 
City Mall (Kathaus) and in front of it a dense 
crowd had gathered. The place suggests respect- 
ability. It stands on the famous "Ring" of boule- 
vards; its ornate nineteenth-century Gothic is as 
spurious as our own St. Stephen's; and ironically 
poised above the crowd there pranced in the guise 
of a medieval knight a figure with the face of the 
old Emperor Francis Joseph. The crowd seemed 
tame, silent, depressed, irresponsive, and half the 
faces even of the demobilized men were as worn 
and gray as their old trench-clothes. 

The speeches sounded as tame as the crowd 
looked. None of the orators had the lungs, or the 

51 



52 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

wit, or the magnetism for this work, and their 
phrases about the misery of the workers, the sel- 
fishness of the capitalists, and the so-called treach- 
ery of the Socialist Ministers were shabby from 
long use. A German orator from Hungary de- 
scribed the glories of its social revolution, but a 
Moderate who followed him posed the unanswer- 
able question : If Vienna made a revolution, could 
Hungary send her the necessary twelve trains of 
daily bread! The official speakers damped the 
meeting at once by announcing that the Commun- 
ist party had come to the decision that the time is 
not yet ripe for action. Presently it was an- 
nounced from the steps that another and larger 
demonstration in the Prater had formed into a 
procession and was marching on the Parliament 
House to present its demands for grants that 
would compensate the prisoners and the disabled 
for something of what they had suffered. 

The whole broad Eing was in motion. The 
electric cars had stopped; one saw nothing but 
the red banners and the masses of moving heads. 
Twenty thousand demonstrators (to make a rough 
guess) were before the Eeichsrath. It is a pseudo- 
classic building, in a solid Doric style, and over 
the mass of revolutionary heads there towered a 
simpering, gilded Minerva and a whole Olympus 
of lesser stony gods. Here, too, there were 
speeches, to me inaudible. I heard only one of 
them, and it was of three words. "We are hun- 
gry,' ' shouted a bluejacket who had climbed a 



HUNGER AND REVOLUTION IN VIENNA 53 

lamp-post. He repeated it six times, and the 
crowd chimed in. It was a genial, irresponsible 
crowd. Some one hoisted "the red rag" on the 
official Parliamentary flagstaff, and then a humor- 
ist tied a neat red bow round Apollo's neck. 

There came soon, however, a decidedly aggres- 
sive noise. Out of sight people were thunderng 
at a door. The deputation had been refused ad- 
mission, and on its behalf the hotheads were break- 
ing the obstacle down. Soon one heard the crash 
of breaking glass, an inciting and exhilarating 
noise, and I could see street-lads and very young 
soldiers systematically dealing with the Parlia- 
mentary windows. It went on for half an hour 
or more before the mounted police appeared. A 
squad of men on fat horses (a well-fed horse is a 
strange sight in starving Austria) rushed round 
the building at a gallop. It was not a skilful ma- 
nceuver. The crowd shouted, gave the minimum 
of ground, and closed up quickly in the rear of the 
charging police. After a short interval the 
"watch" (as Vienna calls it) charged again, this 
time with drawn swords. It dealt some nasty 
blows as it charged, but the only result was that 
the crowd, still forming up behind it, stoned it 
until its rush looked more like a flight than a 
charge. This time a pistol shot was fired as the 
watch went by. It came from a tall, well-dressed 
man, and he certainly fired in the air. 

At last the foot "watch" came out from the 
Parliament with rifles. There was no ceremony, 



54 ACROSS THE MAX KADE 

and none but a visible warning. Advancing like 
skirmishers among the trees of a little garden, 
the police fired single shots at close quarters. 
Close to me a disabled soldier, in uniform, fell 
wounded. He was shot in the thigh and groaned 
in pain as a stream of blood poured out on the 
pavement. His comrades gave * ' first aid" with 
practiced bands. They had dealt with such cases 
every day for four years. Three more were 
wounded round that little garden. The amazing 
thing was the conduct of the crowd. It certainly 
thinned a little, and the more respectable specta- 
tors retired to a distance. The "Invalids" (dis- 
charged soldiers) held their ground. "Nit 
laufen" (Don't run) they called after the first in- 
stinctive movement, and few ran either fast or 
far. In a minute or two most of the men and 
some of the women were pressing forward again, 
shaking fists at the police and shouting kk Murder- 
ers!" The peculiar horror of shooting wounded 
men made every one angry. As for the old sol- 
diers themselves, they cared nothing for rifle-fire, 
it was too familiar, but all round me they were 
lamenting that they had themselves no rifles. 

After this achievement the police retired once 
more. An enterprising youth had appropriated 
Neptune's oar, and with it the business of smash- 
ing in the doors was resumed. A coal-cart tried 
to pass. Instantly the crowd drew it across the 
road to form a barricade. The coals were used as 
ammunition against the upper windows. Ten min- 



HUNGER AND REVOLUTION IN VIENNA 55 

utes later women were gathering up the coals in 
their aprons to kindle proletarian hearths. So 
near is want to revolution. 

The next intruder was a motor-car. It, too, 
was stopped; its petrol was the one thing needful. 
The same youths who had smashed the windows 
were now setting fire to the woodwork. It made 
a magnificent blaze, and in ten minutes the mount- 
ing flames were blackening the solid gray stones, 
and a roaring blast from four windows at once 
was invading the Parliament House. No fire- 
engine came near it, and the police kept their 
watch discreetly round a corner. 

Parliament was in flames, and the crowd 
watched it with growing excitement and delight. 
They were easy to talk to, but they spoke more 
in exclamations than in sentences. "What do we 
want with a Parliament ?" said one. "All power 
to the Soviets," said another. "We're all Bol- 
sheviks now," said a third. "Four years ago 
there were no Bolsheviks. It's the war that has 
done it." "The war!" The word seemed to 
touch a spring in every mind, and presently in the 
little group of disabled soldiers that had gathered 
round me every one seemed to be talking at once 
of what they had suffered on the Carso. They 
talked of ghastly wounds, severed heads, and limbs 
that sped through the air. It was hard to listen 
to all they said, and I heard more curses than 
narratives. Some cursed emperors and capital- 
ists, but in their instinctive way it evidently was 



r>(> ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the whole system oi' society and government in 
Europe that they damned. The plain man in 
England blames the Kaiser for the war. These 
Austrian oripples saw much further, and they 
watched the Barnes with savage pleasure, Tor they 
were consuming a symbol of a system, Two men 
on orutohes stood in front of the crowd warming 
themselves luxuriously in the heat. Most con- 
spicuous of all was a Lame but active man who 
skipped about on his two bent legs and a stick, 
dropping at moments on all fours. His face in 
the light of the tlames was contorted with malice, 
and wherever he went he incited. Once he could 
stand upright and give his arm to a girl. To day, 
like a four-footed beast broken and maimed for 
ever, he was taking his revenge on the past. 

Loud cheers had broken out, and presently a 
motor-car came slowly through the crowd. A 
Volkswehr (militia) officer was in it, ami he made 
a speech under the conflagration. "The Y r olks- 
wehr sympathizes with the just demands of the 
people. In twenty minutes it will be here. Don't 
attack the police. They are afraid of their lives. 
They must march out safely and their rifles shall 
be burned. ('No/ said the crowd, ' distribute 
them among us.') We will keep order. Mean- 
while let no one go away. Trust the Volkswehr 
and wait for us." 

The crowd was overjoyed. "The revolution 
has begun," they said. "The Soviet Republic will 
be proclaimed.' ' The crowd held its ground, but 



HUNGER AND REVOLUTION IN VIENNA 57 

much more than twenty minutes passed, and mean- 
while there was another eharge of the mounted 

men. Tt was the most murderous of all. In the 
dim lighi I could see human shapes writhing on 

the ground, and this time we heard many shots 
from the revolvers of the (Communists, as well as 
from the carbines of the police. Two of the crowd 
appeared brandishing captured police sabers. 
Round the corner there had evidently been some 
casualties among the defenders. The flames 
burned on. Ambulances went about collecting the 
wounded. Amid it all a lamplighter quietly 
passed from lamp to lamp, and little superfluous 
[joints of green-yellow light contrasted with the 
red flames. So does convention go about its work 
of routine with punctual duty amid the chaos of 
the world. That lamplighter, who wont his habit- 
ual way amid the dying and the blaze, seemed to 
me somehow to resemble a diplomatist. 

At last the Volkswehr appeared amid the wel- 
comes of the crowd. The bayonets were not fixed, 
and almost casually they drew a cordon round the 
flames. They did not push or charge or threaten. 
"Comrade, please, a little way back," "Comrade, 
if you don't mind, will you please step over this 
railing?" And the comrades obeyed, and were 
glad to obey. 

But what was going to happen ? The Volkswehr 
is a Socialist force. Was it going to make a ring 
round the Parliament while it burned? It looked 
like that. But presently one realized that a ma- 



M ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

chine was playing on the (lames from inside. In 
twenty mi miles they were out. The Volkswehr, 
then, believes in parliaments. There is to be no 
revolution. 1 

The crowd was melting away. Cordons were 
being drawn across all the approaches. One little 
group still remained in the King, gathered round 
something on the ground. A police horse had 
been shot in the last charge. The police horses 
are fat. One man carried off a steak, and another 
a leg. In a few minutes the skeleton and the 
saddle remained. "We are hungry," the sailor 
had said. "We are hungry,' ' answered the crowd. 

Viknna, April 17, 1019. 

i Revolution was impossible in Vienna for the simple reason 
that it depended on the Entente for food. The British Com- 
missioner announced that all supplies of food would cease, if riots 
took place. 

In much more intimate and less defensible ways than this, 
the Entente, through t lio Reparation Commission, will virtually 
govern Austria. The bankrupt State retains only a nominal 
independence. Its whole fiscal policy, and therefore its whole 
internal policy, will necessarily depend on the good will of the 
Commission. That result is by no means displeasing to the 
upper world of finance and society in Vienna. As a very influ- 
ential Austrian Liberal politician and financier said to me, 
"Control by the Entente will be welcome, for it will enable us 
to resist the BChemes of our Socialists." It must be remembered 
that these ministerial Socialists are of the most moderate evolu- 
tionary school. 

It is primarily because union with Germany offered the only 
prospect of escape from foreign tutelage that the Austria So- 
cialists demanded it, and will continue to demand it. 



IV 

A DEAD CITY IN POLAND 

Lodz is a city which boasts that it is the Polish 
Manchester. In its present plight it brings back 
memories of a big northern town in England dur- 
ing its holiday week. The sky is clear and of a 
faint wintry blue. The air is surprisingly clean. 
The factories, one and all, lift their great chimney- 
stacks skywards, but no smoke issues from any 
of them. The gates are shut; the machines are 
silent, and when dark falls the vast masses of 
brick are solid bulks of gloom. But it is not fair- 
week in Lodz. For four years this city has been 
idle. In the midst of this featureless Polish plain, 
it had none the less lived by the sea. Its fate was 
sealed when cotton ceased to enter Bremen harbor, 
and life will return to it only when cotton can 
reach it through Danzig. It is a monument to 
the efficacy of the blockade, which dealt impar- 
tially with friend and foe, with Pole and German. 
The enemy occupation was not in this town wan- 
tonly destructive or exceptionally harsh. Metal 
of all kinds was requisitioned as it was in Ger- 
many itself. Brass plates were stripped from the 
doors. Copper wire was taken from the electric 
tramways, and a heavy substitute supplied. Some 
parts were taken from machines, especially from 



60 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

finishing machines. The fact remains, however, 
that to the extent of about 75 per cent, the facto- 
ries are intact. They need only raw cotton and 
wool, with a stock of tools and driving belts, to 
start again. The stories of wholesale devastation 
which are current no further away than Warsaw 
are a war-time legend. Lodz has suffered, but the 
suffering fell and falls to-day far more heavily 
on the workers than on their masters. Capital has 
survived the war. The great buildings, the in- 
genious machines, the valuable sites — they are all 
more or less intact. It is the workers whose chil- 
dren have died, whose garrets are empty of gear, 
whose starved bodies and slack nerves will be in- 
capable, for many a month to come, of reaching 
their old standard of skilful and enduring labor. 

How does a population of 500,000 contrive to 
exist for four years without work! I asked my- 
self that question continually during my stay in 
Lodz, but I could get no satisfactory answer. It 
was not for fully a year that want began. Poland 
was full of food in those early months : the usual 
export, especially of potatoes,- was stopped, and 
prices fell to almost nominal figures. The period 
of requisitions for German needs came later. 
Lodz solved its problem partly by taking to 
smuggling, and partly by reducing its population. 
Three-quarters of a century ago it was an unpre- 
tending village. Saxon weavers established its 
textile industries, and even now German is the 
home-language of nearly a third of the population. 



A DEAD CITY IN POLAND 61 

The Polish workers were peasants who rarely lost 
touch completely with the country. They came 
to town for some years to earn the savings which 
would enable them to buy an acre or two of land. 
When the mills stopped, some of these people 
drifted back to their villages. Others went freely 
to work in German munition factories, or on Ger- 
man farms. Some thousands, on the plea that 
they were without means of subsistence, were de- 
ported to Germany by force, or more usually by 
the threat of force. Even now, though the Polish 
soldiers from the Eussian Army and the German 
migrants have for the most part returned, the 
population of Lodz is under 350,000. The mor- 
tality from the chief diseases of privation, typhus 
and tuberculosis, has been appallingly high. On 
the other hand, the Germans put an end to the 
usual plagues of this dirty and insanitary town. 
For its water Lodz relies on wells, and the pump 
stands amid the filth of the back courts in all the 
older quarters of the town. For sole drainage 
there are the deep gutters in the streets, and one 
notes as one walks through them when it is wash- 
ing day, for then the open sewers run blue. The 
Russians would never allow improvement; what 
was good enough for Moscow, they said, would do 
for Lodz. The Germans cleaned out the wells and 
the disappearance of typhoid stands to their 
credit. 1 Let no one imagine, however, that a 

i Much the worst thing that the Germans did in Poland was 
the deportation of the unemployed to forced labor in Germany. 



62 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

hunger-cure of four years is salutary. The chil- 
dren have suffered the most pitiably. I watched 
some children in a model kindergarten singing 
their "action" songs. The voices were a very 
thin pipe. The movements were listless and per- 
functory. One could see that even the children 
had learned to economize energy. There was just 
one pair of rosy cheeks in the whole school, and 
it belonged to a boy who had come that week from 
the country. The real shock came when I began 
to ask the older children their ages. Where one 

Apart from this measure, which was not very extensively ap- 
plied, their rule was perhaps no harsher than military admin- 
istration eommonly is. They did not adopt in Poland their 
Belgian tactics of intimidation. They requisitioned heavily, but 
paid for what they took, or (as in the case of the copper) gave 
receipts. They did some useful constructive work by laying 
light railways and the like. They forced the mine-owners of 
the Dombrover basin for the first time to pay a living wage. 
They sold rationed flour at a very low price, and they helped 
the people of the devastated area to rebuild. Every one agreed 
that the conduct of the garrisons in the towns was good, and 
even people on whom they had been quartered had few com- 
plaints to make, though no one seemed to like them. I heard, 
always accidentally, of some good deeds: thus an officer 
quartered in Warsaw opened an asylum- for Polish orphans at 
his own cost, and another started a home for lost dogs. Why 
the Poles, on the whole, disliked (Germans more bitterly than 
their Russian oppressors is still for me something of a mystery. 
An able Polish literary man gave me an explanation which seems 
plausible. Under the Russian censorship no Polish newspaper 
could mention any Russian iniquity, however gross. On the 
other hand, all Polish newspapers were allowed, and even en- 
couraged, to make the most of every Polish grievance against 
German rule in Poseo This unconscious selection over a long 
term of years had its effect. Propaganda in the modern world 
weaves the mind of the mass, much as a mill weaves cotton. 



A DEAD CITY IN POLAND 63 

expected the answer "nine or ten," it came "thir- 
teen or fourteen." These years will leave their 
mark on Poland. Even the recruits of twenty who 
have just been conscripted look like English lads 
four or five years younger. The medical officer of 
Lodz told me that among the poor, births have 
almost ceased, and the reason, he maintained, is 
simply the physical exhaustion of the women. 

Under German rule Lodz suffered silently with 
that deplorable patience which seems to be the 
chief characteristic of the Polish worker. The 
new life began in those magical days of November, 
when the army of occupation melted suddenly 
away. The Secret Socialist military organization 
which looked up to the imprisoned General Pilsud- 
ski as its leader disarmed the unresisting gar- 
rison. Unarmed lads went up to the sentries and 
officers in the streets, and walked away with rifles 
and swords as their trophies. The incredible thing 
was possible only because the German private was 
ready for his release and welcomed any excuse 
to throw off the yoke. Some tore off their iron 
crosses and trampled on them, and all were un- 
feignedly glad. In these days under Communist 
(i.e. Bolshevik) leadership, a Council of Workmen 
(Soviet) was formed, with its office in the hand- 
some flat where the German Commandant had 
lived. I doubt if it does or ever really did repre- 
sent the starving, apathetic masses of Lodz. The 
elections were carried out on the Russian model 
in each of the idle factories, and each fifty of the 



64 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

former workmen were supposed to elect a dele- 
gate. It was a very thin muster that attended 
these meetings ; the elections went by a rough-and- 
ready show of hands, and profane persons say 
that more delegates than voters were present. 
None the less for some weeks the Lodz Soviet ex- 
ercised a little power. The Socialist and Peasant 
Government of Moraczewski was in office at War- 
saw, and most of the rich men in town and country 
believed that a social revolution was at hand. It 
was a period of concessions and promises. Every- 
where, in town and country, the policy of the Po- 
lish Eadas (Soviets) was to demand from the em- 
ployers what they called a "war-indemnity" for 
the workers. We should call it a "bonus." The 
usual claim was for 600 marks in a lump sum, for 
each man (il5 in exchange value, about i5 in pur- 
chasing power). With the cheapest kind of work- 
man's shirt at 40 marks, and a pair of shoes with 
wooden soles at 70 or 80 marks, this "bonus" 
chiefly represented the means of buying a few 
clothes for the winter, or taking a blanket out of 
pawn. The manufacturers offered to meet this 
claim by lending ten million marks to the Govern- 
ment, but before the money could be raised the So- 
cialist Peasant Cabinet, boycotted by the Entente, 
had fallen, 1 and with M. Paderewski's coming, the 

i It fell because Paris would not " recognize " it. At the 
subsequent elections the Conservative but demagogic "National 
Democrats " carried the day, because in every pulpit the priests 
declared that only to this party would the Entente grant money, 
food, and arms. 



A DEAD CITY IN POLAND G5 

propertied class recovered Prom its panic. There 

were tumultuous gatherings iu Lodz- kt riots" is 

not the word, for no one was hurt. One manu- 
facturer was shut for twenty tour hours iu his 
house. Others disappeared to Warsaw or Switz- 
erland. In the end a Tew of them compromised 
the claim for fifty or a hundred marks. When I 
visited Lodz one felt that the Soviet existed on 
sufferance: the masters 1 rusted to the firm hand 
of the police. All day long a squadron of mounted 
gendarmes, armed with carbine and Lance, pranced 

up and down the principal streets. It was a con- 
spicuous display of force, and the Polish police 
have rough hands, which readily used their weap- 
ons. 1 The police seemed to he feeling their way. 
On one of the days of my visit a plenary sitting 
of the Rada had been " proclaimed," as they say 
in Ireland. The men with the long lances paraded 
outside the theater- where it should have met, and 
the crowd of workmen melted sheepishly away. 

The real success of the Soviet's work was, how- 
ever, that the Government, represented locally by 
Socialist or semi-Socialist officials, began the sys- 
tematic distribution of relief to the unemployed. 

I The police in Warsaw always carried rifles, and sometimes 
paraded the streets with fixed bayonets. During a strike, in 
a working-class street, I watched them searching casual 
passers-by, and breaking up little groups of even two or three 
gossiping neighbors by administering vicious blows with the 
butt of their rifles on the men's hacks. A lad was audacious 
enough to laugh, and he got a lunge from a bayonet to teach 
him manners. 



66 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

The intention of the Lodz Soviet was to start pub- 
lic works. Drains, roads, railways — here was the 
chance to do all that the Russians had neglected. 
Two difficulties stood in the way, the Polish winter 
and an empty treasury. The Soviet, with scien- 
tific help, estimated with a table of food values in 
calories what the cost at present prices of a bare 
subsistence would be. Omitting new clothes and 
allowing only a little for repairs, it came for a 
family of two adults and two children to 15 marks 
a day. A few hundreds are now working at this 
wage. There are, however, in Lodz and the neigh- 
boring textile villages, no less than 253,900 human 
beings who belong to unemployed families. They 
are living now on a maximum dole of 5 marks for 
each family daily. I went over the big orderly de- 
partment which manages the clerical work of this 
starving industrial army, and watched the queues 
at the pay desk. I got into talk with a group of 
German-speaking women who were waiting. How 
does one live on 35 marks a week in Lodz ? From 
three of them I collected an average family 
budget : 20 marks for potatoes, with beet-root as 
a variation, 10 marks for bread (often uneatable), 
15 marks for coal and wood (usually damp). 
"How much do you allow for meat or butter or 
milk!" The question raised a far from merry 
laugh. "We never see such things. " "But," 
said I, "you are 10 marks out of the reckoning? " 
"We generally are," was the answer, and "then 
we have to sell something.' ' It was no exaggera- 



A DEAD CITY IN POLAND G7 

tion. I went over some workmen's dwellings, old 
and new, good and bad. The nearly invariable 
rule was one room to a family. In one ten people 
slept on the floor. There was no bed, no bedding, 
no blanket. In another a table and a small bed 
remained in an otherwise absolutely empty flat. 
On the table were three books, a treatise on Logic, 
another on the higher Mathematics, and a History 
of Modern Thought. The young man who had 
pawned everything but his books was, needless to 
say, a Socialist. One old man still kept his violin, 
but his wife, he said, had no boots. In all but 
the most miserable rooms there were lithographs 
of the Madonna or the Saints upon the walls. 

Why does Lodz endure in patience? For me 
those lithographs of the Saints supply the answ T er. 
With all its sky-scrapers and its machines that 
vie with Lancashire, with its half German civili- 
zation, and its memories of roaring trade, Lodz 
lives in two worlds. Its Jews in their black caps 
and gowns are straitly bound to the Law. Even 
its Lutherans tend to pietism. Its Catholic faith 
is sufficiently alive to be original. It has one 
church which has broken with Rome and set up a 
sort of Hussite organization, with married priests 
and the Eucharist in both kinds. It has a numer- 
ous Order of men and women vowed to obedience, 
chastity, and poverty, who live in common but 
work at their ordinary trades in shop and mill, 
without distinctive dress. That expedient was 
adopted by the ardent piety of the Poles, when 



68 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the Kussians forbade the entry of any fresh nov- 
ices into the recognized monastic Orders. These 
lay monks and nuns, who spin and weave and 
build, with horny hands, in workmen's clothes, 
are probably the most effective propagandist force 
which the Church possesses in Poland. Whenever 
I entered a church it seemed to be crowded, and 
crowded with men who would stand unwearied 
through long sermons and services which had little 
musical attraction. One could not mistake the 
deep feeling of the rapt faces or the fervor of 
the voices that joined in the singing. Eeligion 
pervades everything in Poland. There are Catho- 
lic Trade Unions, Jewish Trade Unions, and So- 
cialist, which means secular, Trade Unions, each 
sharply separated from the rest. There is a 
Clerical Labor Party, a Socialist Labor Party, and 
no less than three Jewish parties. Of the eight 
seats in the Diet, the Lodz Socialists won only 
two, while three went to the Clericalist Labor 
Group. The obtrusive machinery of repression 
struck me as superfluous. It is not the lancers 
that keep starving Lodz in order. Its protector 
is that Madonna on the garret walls. She can 
stifle the promptings of unrest, and teach the 
proletarian to hug his chains. The wonder-worker 
has performed every moral miracle save one : she 
has never yet iouched the heart of a mill-owner in 
Lodz. 

Warsaw, March, 1919. 



V 

ON THE MAEGIN OF RUSSIA 

I remember the satisfaction of our more correct 
newspapers, when the Russians retired in 1915, 
beyond the River Bug, devastating the country 
as they went. Our military writers recalled the 
tactics of 1812, and predicted for the enemy the 
fate of Napoleon. One reasons otherwise, when 
one has seen the devastation. It was carried out 
in Cossack style, with more feeling than plan. At 
Brest-Litovsk, the town of the ill-omened peace, 
the greater part of the Jewish quarter lies in 
ruins. That work was done with comparative 
thoroughness, and with some zest in the task. The 
great railway station, however, was only singed. 
The immense barracks, a small town in itself, was 
left intact. Even the citadel with its stores was 
only partly damaged. When the Germans 
marched in, they found rails and stores for all 
their needs, and the barracks opened their com- 
fortable doors. They stand to-day as the Russians 
left them, save only that the Germans have painted 
moral proverbs and edifying rhymes upon the 
whitewash. Out in the countryside the same scene 
of desolation confronts the traveler. Jewish and 
Catholic villages have been burned with moderate 

69 



70 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

care. Ruin is all that remains to record the 
Russian memory. The Germans, to do them 
justice, have left behind them some traces of con- 
structive work — a bridge here, a road there, an 
engine-house in a wayside station — and they gave 
facilities for the rebuilding from the State forests 
of the peasants' houses of wood. 

From all this border belt the population was 
ruthlessly driven as the Russians retired. Most 
of it went Far East, to Orenburg on the remotest 
verge of Europe, and to-day, fleeing from one 
scene of misery, it returns to another. They are 
streaming back from starving Russia to starving 
Poland, and when they reach their villages it is 
to find the ashes of their homes amid untilled 
fields. On the way from Warsaw to Brest, at a 
junction named Lukow, we had met a score of 
these peasants, women and men, conspicuous in 
their sheepskin coats and their gay costumes em- 
broidered in red and yellow. They had come that 
morning to Lukow from a village two hundred 
miles away, and they were going back by the next 
train. The purpose of their visit f They point to 
their sacks of flour. In their own village there is 
none to buy, nor is there any nearer than Lukow. 
"Is not the journey very costly V we ask. They 
have money, they say. They were driven into 
Russia by the Cossacks in 1915, and they have 
only just come back. A man draws out of his 
belt a wallet full of Russian roubles. They were 
well paid under the Bolsheviks, they say. And 



ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA 71 

now? "Our houses are burned, and we have no 
bread." The train came in, and they scurried off 
to their military truck labeled "40 men 6 horses." 
An old woman falls under her sack. A young girl 
bursts into tears as she tries to lift her burden. 
Shouting, pushing, thumping, the guard at last 
has packed them in. 

Of the inhabitants who escaped the Cossacks, 
not all remained at home. Some went freely to 
work in Germany, but thousands were deported by 
force. In the great empty barracks at Brest you 
may see specimens of both these migrations, with 
detachments of war-prisoners in addition. ' The 
families camp in the big rooms, and an overworked 
superintendent attempts to sort out the sick for a 
hospital which lacks every necessity save human 
kindness. There is no white bread, no sugar, no 
milk to be had, even for the hospital, and of drugs 
there are next to none. The refugees return with 
typhus among them, but disinfectants are almost 
wholly lacking, and of sulphur there is none The 
few doctors are busy all day among the refugees 
and m the fever hospital of the tow. Out in the 
villages there is neither doctor nor nurse, nor any 
one to aid. Typhus is a winter disease, and the 
day of its power is nearly over now, but it will be 
followed by influenza, dysentery, and cholera as 
the summer draws on. 

Brest, of the cruel peace, is no happy place 
to-day. It is still largely a Jewish town. An old 
long-bearded Jew, dressed, as all Orthodox Jews 



72 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

are dressed in the East, in a long black gown and 
a little black cap, led me to the Rabbi, praising him 
as we walked. In the Rabbi's study a woman, 
wearing some red and white ritual stole over her 
dress, was reading what I took to be prayers, as 
I entered. It was the eve of Purim. She went 
on undisturbed, and spoke to me only when she 
had reached a stopping-place. The room was 
lined with a big library which contained no books 
in any profane language. In this little cell the 
Word was in Hebrew. The Rabbi himself was a 
gentle old man, with a worn and spiritual face, 
which recalled to me Spinoza's, save for the long 
gray beard. He talked a rapid and very peculiar 
German which was apt to verge into Yiddish, but 
we contrived to understand each other. He first 
told me the tale, which I was to hear from every 
Jew in a sort of crescendo, until I reached Pinsk. 
The town lived in daily fear under the Polish mili- 
tary occupation. It must be explained that the 
Polish officers are firmly convinced that every Jew 
is a Bolshevik, and even that every Jewish house 
(as the General put it) harbors a Jewish spy or a 
Red Guard in hiding. It is true that some of the 
Jewish Socialist youth of this district have joined 
the Bolsheviks, but an honest man who believes 
that these old long-bearded Orthodox Jews feel 
anything but horror at the thought of a social 
revolution must have parted with his wits. The 
result of this belief is that the Jews live in a state 
of minor terror — the technical name is " minor 



ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA 73 

siege." It is a crime to be out after seven at 
night, and one hears in the dark the frequent crack 
of the sentries' rifles. All Hebrew or Yiddish in- 
scriptions have been removed from shops, schools, 
and Jewish hospitals. I was told in some detail 
of local Jews who had been shot as Bolsheviks 
by field court-martial. The Jewish community 
vouched for their innocence, but it could only 
plead, after the event, that they should not be 
buried as criminals. Every day, it seems, the 
soldiers sally out into the street, catch the first 
Jew they meet, and drag him with insults, or even 
with blows, into the barracks, to perform menial 
duties unpaid. Several of the Jews of Brest re- 
counted to me their personal experience of this 
treatment, and they declared that as many as 
twenty cases of the kind occur in a day. At Pinsk 
I heard the same thing, and even at Warsaw this 
system went on in the first month after the Ger- 
mans left. The Rabbi took me to visit the crowded 
families who once had lived in the burned quarter 
of Brest. They were living, camped in little 
family groups in a big barnlike upper room, sick 
and whole, young and old, closely packed together. 
Some were ill, and there was no doctor. The 
Jewish doctor, it seems, had died some days be- 
fore. "Why not call a Polish doctor?" I asked. 
The answer was a bitter smile and a gesture that 
denoted the impossible. All were hungry, but I 
saw the accounts of the incredible sums which the 
local community had expended to buy them bread. 



74 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

These Jewish refugees, let me add, were very- 
much cleaner, and more careful of decency and 
sanitation, than most of the Christians in the same 
case. 

Pinsk lies a weary journey of eight hours by 
train from Brest. Ours was a military train — 
there are no others — and the trucks were filled 
partly with young soldiers going to the front, and 
partly with peasants who had made a distant 
excursion to buy bread. A fierce east wind was 
blowing, and icicles hung from the station pumps. 
Our engine leaked, and it had to be watered by 
hand with buckets, a process that took at each sta- 
tion on an average an hour. The Polish soldiers 
were mostly youths. None of them had great- 
coats, and not all of them had uniforms. In this 
state, by full moon, I watched them marching out 
to face the Bolshevik, who are skirmishing twelve 
miles beyond the town. In the town itself there 
marched slowly, at the goose-step, a patrol of 
Russian " White Guards.' ' All of them were of- 
ficers. They were well dressed, and physically 
splendid men. They sang as- they moved slowly 
onward, a haunting melancholy Russian chorus. 
For them too in this town of misery one tried to 
spare pity. They have lost everything save the 
hope of vengeance. 

Poland proper has not enough to eat, and what 
it has is fabulously dear. But Poland proper is 
not literally starving. East of the River Bug 
begins the zone of famine. At Pinsk one enters 



ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA 75 

a sample of Russia. It has changed hands thrice 
in six months. The Germans were followed by the 
Ukrainians (Petliura's men) : they were driven 
out by the Bolsheviki: the Poles took over the 
starving town (only a madman would defend it) 
three weeks ago. East of the Bug, it must be ex- 
plained, the Polish population is a small minority, 
consisting of the landlords and a small part of the 
townsmen. The towns and larger villages are 
overwhelmingly Jewish. The peasants are in the 
south, Ukrainian, and in the north, White Rus- 
sians. Their distinguishing characteristics are 
land-hunger and Orthodoxy. Some, indeed, had 
already sacked the Polish manor-houses, as a pre- 
liminary to the division of the land. The Bolshe- 
viki sacrificed no lives. Their pillaging in any 
nor any constructive monument behind them, but 
while they certainly pillaged to some extent, it 
must also be recorded that in the town the Bolshe- 
viki sacrificed no lives. Their pillaging in any 
event was much less than that which the Polish 
troops carried out in the first hours of their ar- 
rival. The Jews maintain that their community 
lost no less than three million roubles. That 
sounds like an exaggeration, but I heard details 
from individual Jews (of course, without proof), 
who were respected in their own circles, of rob- 
beries ranging from 5,000 to 100 roubles. So far, 
the Polish occupation is by far the harshest which 
Pinsk has experienced, from Tsarist days down- 
wards. The military know that they are unwel- 



76 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

come, and they seek, because their forces are 
wholly inadequate, to secure themselves by sever- 
ity. The leaders of the Ukrainian (Orthodox) 
population are mostly in prison and their news- 
papers have been suppressed. "We know," said 
the young officer who acted as commandant of the 
town, "that the villages are hostile. It has been 
decided to burn some of them, and decimate the 
inhabitants.' ' That young man was in a respon- 
sible position of command, and he appeared to 
mean what he said. 1 For this Jewish-Orthodox 
land under Polish rule I can see no happy future. 
Military severities will cease sooner or later. 
Flour and medicines from America arrived on the 
day after I left. But the agrarian and political 
problems remain. The Polish plan is to colonize 
this country with Polish settlers, which is much 
what the Germans did in Posen. 

Nearly every shop in the broad streets of 
wooden houses is closed. There is literally noth- 
ing to sell. The four Jewish Co-operative Stores 
are all closed. I found the Catholic Co-operative 
Store open, however, in a Franciscan Monastery 
on whose walls a late seventeenth-century fresco 
showed the saint preaching in a powdered wig 
and peach-colored coat to the birds. I examined 

i This threat was spoken with so much brutality, and accorded 
so well with all that I observed of the treatment of the Jews 
in Pinsk by the Polish officers, that I determined to report it. 
The context of the Commandant's speech showed that he meant 
that it had been literally decided to make an example by shooting 



ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA 77 

its whole stock with care. Its stock consisted of 
salt, and of literally nothing else. Up till the de- 
parture of the Germans there was food in Pinsk. 
The ration was small, and the quality was bad, 
but it was very cheap and it was fairly distributed. 
Since they left, the town has come each week a 
little nearer to complete starvation. The price of 
a loaf of nearly uneatable " black' ' bread is now 
from five to nine "Tsar's roubles,' ' and even so 
it is hard to find. On the day of my visit, the 
Jewish Orphanage and the Almshouse were en- 
tirely without either bread or fuel. I went round 
a number of homes in working-class streets. A 
few families still had a stock of potatoes (there 
are none to buy), and the rest were living chiefly 
on chestnuts or carrots or beet-root. The police 
told me that men and women frequently faint from 
hunger in the streets, and I actually saw two 
corpses of men skeletons, half-clothed in rags. 
The people are now almost too weak to help them- 
selves, and though there are woods not far away, 
it is hard to find a man, and harder still to find a 
horse, fit to fetch fuel. The birth-rate had fallen 

one in ten. On my return to Warsaw I went straight to the 
President, General Pilsudski, who listened with attention but 
without surprise to what I told him, and promised to take prompt 
action. Ten days later, as the Jews of Pinsk were holding a 
meeting of their Community to discuss measures for the relief 
of the poor, the troops surrounded the building and arrested 
those present to the number of seventy. Without even the 
pretense of a trial and without any definite charge one in two 
were shot on the spot. 



78 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

last year (1918) from a normal thirty-one per 
thousand to seven. The death-rate had risen from 
fifteen to twenty-nine. The figures to-day must 
be very much worse. Old women came crying 
round me like gibbering Homeric ghosts, so light 
they seemed, murmuring that they were cold, and 
children with white lips, pinched faces, and trans- 
parent hands. This day was, I hope, the worst for 
Pinsk, Five trucks of American flour were ex- 
pected in the evening. That is a very small store, 
and when the next will come no one knows. For 
the villages no help is yet in sight. Most of them 
lie far from the railway, and even on the railway 
the few trucks and engines are all required for the 
war against the Bolsheviks. Poland (always re- 
sponsive to Parisian opinion) has rejected re- 
peated overtures of peace from Moscow. For an 
indefinite time to come this hungry country must 
take its chance among military needs. 

Another vivid memory stands out from this 
journey to the edge of Russia. It is of a night 
spent halfway between Brest and Pinsk in the 
lonely country-house of a Polish landlord. A cour- 
teous scholarly man, with a tall ancestral tree, he 
spent his life in a library well stocked with ancient 
books. He had some beautifully printed six- 
teenth-century classics, but I think he read the 
Fathers more often than his Elzevir Horace. I 
looked at the names and dates in these books, 
which showed how this race, living amid the 
Russian darkness of this Borderland, had handed 



ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA 79 

down its Latin and Catholic culture from father to 
son through three centuries. This old stock had 
descended at last to the simplicity of barbarism. 
Out beyond the little wood, with its friendly crows, 
amid which the house stood, the land was desert. 
The village had been burned, and the peasants 
had followed the Cossacks somewhere over the 
gleaming Pripet marshes into the depths of 
Russia. The fields had gone out of cultivation, 
and this lonely civilized man camped amid the 
ruin like some Crusoe on his island. His son in- 
deed lived with him, a spirited young man of nine- 
teen or twenty; I had taken him at first for a re- 
tainer of the house, for he wore the roughest 
peasant clothes, and I could hardly believe my 
ears when he addressed me unexpectedly in 
French. The war had ended his schooling, and 
now he drove the plow and planted the potatoes 
on which he and his father subsisted. The house 
was all but empty of furniture. Twice a Bolshevik 
band had sacked it from cellar to garret, once the 
Bolsheviks had threatened his life, and the Polish 
troops as they advanced had taken the little that 
the Bolsheviks had left. Money and clothes, 
horses and cattle, and the family heirlooms of 
many generations — all were gone. The old man 
none the less was serene. A cousin who shared 
our dinner of potatoes was in still worse case : his 
peasants had burned his house down, and driven 
him out into the wilderness. Our host looked back 
on the goings and comings of Cossacks and Ger- 



80 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

mans 1 and Bolsheviks, and still he survived, and 
his home stood foursquare. He pointed to an 
image of the Virgin over the doorway: "Who 
knows,' ' he murmured, "perhaps it was She who 
saved me." His most cherished treasures too 
had tempted none of the robbers. We sat in his 
library talking and handling the books through 
half the night. He talked of Carlyle, for whom 
he had a peculiar veneration, and then digressed 
to Mary Stuart, whose history, romantic Pole that 
he was, he had studied with minute care. He 
talked with much eloquence of Cicero, and the 
frailties of that eminent stylist moved him to a 
contempt more vivid and passionate than he 
felt for any living statesman. He talked of 
the storks and the crows, and other happy crea- 
tures whom he loves in the wood around his 
home. He talked of his forefathers who had 
played a man's part in Polish history, and as 
he said good-night, he recited for me the 
musical prayer in Latin verse that tradition 
ascribes to Mary Stuart. I bade him and his 
empty house a regretful goool-by, for it seemed 
to me that the ruined culture to which it belonged 
is a thing more gracious and dignified by far 
than the monstrous births of our age. Another 
decade of wars and blockades and revolutions, and 
every relic of learning and humanity may be swept 
away from the Rhine to the Volga. There must 

i So far from robbing him, the Germans during their stay had 
improved his property for him, 



ON THE MARGIN OF RUSSIA 81 

have been, when the barbarians surged over the 
Roman provinces in the twilight centuries, lonely 
villas, left standing amid the ruins of the Empire, 
in which old men survived, conning Greek manu- 
scripts in pillaged rooms, while the Goths enjoyed 
their wealth. Not all at once, nor without the 
flicker of a false dawn, did the darkness compass 
them around. 

As the months of desolation lengthened into 
years, these old men hoped for the return of civi- 
lization, and dying prayed that their sons would 
live to see it. Their sons lived like barbarians, 
dimly remembering the interrupted studies of 
their youth. Their sons' sons were barbarians 
born. 

Warsaw, March 28, 1919. 



VI 

THE POLISH JEWS 

One goes to Poland with a firm conviction that 
its civilization is of the West. Latin was the 
language of its ancient culture. Did not Coperni- 
cus lay the basis of our modern outlook at Cracow? 
One feels, as one cannot feel in Eussia or Turkey, 
that the ancestors of its people passed through 
the same formative influences, Eenaissance, Ee- 
formation and "Enlightenment," as our own. 
One sight seemed to contradict these impressions 
even in the first walk through Warsaw streets. 
The snow was on the ground. The sledges, the 
crows, and the gilded Byzantine church suggested 
Eussia. But the Jews in the streets reminded me 
of Salonica. Here was a race living, by its own 
choice, that life of separation which is normal in 
the East. In Turkey one expects it. Every race 
has there its own language, its own costume, its 
own religion. The Jews there are not more sepa- 
rate than Greeks or Armenians. In Poland this 
Eastern phenomenon surprises. Even in the 
larger towns the majority of the men, including 
some who are wealthy, continue to wear their tra- 
ditional costume — the black gown, the little black 
cap, and the inevitable beard and the peculiar curl 
prescribed by ritual. These men in the strange 



THE POLISH JEWS 83 

garb talk no Polish among themselves: their 
speech is still the German jargon which they 
brought with them long centuries back from the 
Rhine. Thus it happens that from his first years 
of childhood the young Pole grows up with the 
sense that these strangely dressed men with the 
incomprehensible speech are foreigners in his 
land. Why it is so, I do not know. You will see 
no black gowns in Hungary, nor hear Yiddish in 
the streets, and the Hungarian Jew speaks Mag- 
yar at home,, and feels himself a Hungarian 
citizen. 

The outer garb covers a personality which is as 
little Polish as the dress is European. The aver- 
age Orthodox Jew, even in the middle class, has 
grown up in a mental world which nowhere 
touches that of his Polish neighbor. His educa- 
tion has been almost exclusively religious. He 
knows Hebrew as few of us ever knew our Latin. 
I have heard poor Jewish children talking Hebrew 
as they played on the streets. His wits have been 
exercised in the gymnastic of Talmudic casuistry. 
Of European history or modern science he knows 
(or used to know) nothing. If he is an idealist 
(and this persecuted race is rich in idealists), it 
is not the Polish nationalist dream or the Socialist 
Utopia, or the scientist's passion to know the 
causes of things, that allure him, but rather his 
secret, disdainful, theocratic vision of a chosen 
race true to its destiny and bound by its law. It 
is not easy to admire the wisdom which takes as 



84 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

its chosen field for idealism the obstinate resolve 
to observe the Sabbath rather than Sunday as the 
weekly day of rest. But one must bow with a sort 
of veneration before the self-sacrifice of this race 
which in Poland, has handicapped itself in the 
daily competition of industry because it will not 
compromise with the law. The mental gulf be- 
tween this old world and any modern culture is 
deep. It is so deep that Jewish girls of the middle 
class, who have had a more conventional modern 
education, feel themselves aliens at their marriage 
with young men of their own race who were bred 
in the Orthodox lore. 

If the reader asks why the Poles, alone of all 
races professedly Western in their culture, live 
with this impassable gulf between themselves and 
their Jews, I am somewhat puzzled to find the 
answer. Firstly, they were not, until to-day, a 
ruling people: they could not attract others to 
themselves. Secondly, there are historical rea- 
sons. It may be partly a consequence of the wide 
autonomy, legal and fiscal, conceded by the old 
Polish Kingdom to the Jews. - It is probable also 
that the Russians deliberately widened the gulf. 
Thirdly, the cultural level of the Poles themselves 
was too low for a bridge to be built on an intellec- 
tual basis. The Jew had his own ancient culture. 
The poorer Pole, unlettered and untaught, pos- 
sessed no culture at all. His one spiritual posses- 
sion was his Catholic faith. It is, I think, the tra- 
ditional association of Polish nationality with the 



THE POLISH JEWS 85 

Catholic religion, which makes the barrier against 
the Jews so difficult to lower. The Pole empha- 
sized his Catholicism against his Prussian Prot- 
estant conquerors in the West, and his Russian 
Orthodox conquerors in the East. The few Prot- 
estant Poles in East Prussia and Silesia lost all 
sense of their Polish nationality. Ask a peasant 
or a woman in any mixed area if he or she is a 
Pole, and the affirmative answer will usually be, 
"I am a Catholic." I have often heard that an- 
swer myself, and for me it gave the clue. In 
Hungary the Calvinist minority was always as 
much Magyar as the Catholic majority, and re- 
ligion was never reckoned a part of nationality. 
In Poland as in Turkey, nationality and religion 
are one idea. The Jews are in sentiment excluded 
from the Polish nation because they are not Catho- 
lics. A Jew is really adopted as a Pole, only when 
he compounds with the world by accepting bap- 
tism. 

So far as I could gather, the open preaching 
of anti-Semitism and the organized persecution of 
the Jews in Poland are comparatively recent phe- 
nomena. A Pole will always begin any conversa- 
tion about the Jews by recalling the traditional 
tolerance of the Polish State. That is, I fear, a 
myth: it was on the persecution of both of the 
Protestants and the Orthodox that Prussia and 
Russia fastened as a pretext for the first Parti- 
tion. The fact is that modern anti-Semitism in 
Poland has an obvious economic root. Until the 



86 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

middle of last century the Jews were the only 
middle class in Poland, and the only trading class. 
Poles were either landowners, peasant owners, or 
laborers. In the last fifty years Poles have in- 
creasingly taken to trade and even to industry, 
though the names of most of the larger firms are 
still preponderantly German or Jewish. Usually 
these magnates are baptized Jews. This belated 
industrial development in Poland, delayed by the 
heavy hand of Tsardom, brought Jewish and 
Christian traders and shopkeepers, when it came at 
length, into sharp competition. As in Austria, so in 
Poland, this economic competition was obvious ma- 
terial for the political agitator. M. Eoman Dmow- 
ski, the founder of the old National Democratic 
("N.D.") Party, did what Lueger and the "Chris- 
tian Socialists ' ' did in Vienna : he roped the small 
middle-class man, who felt the pressure of Jewish 
competition, into an essentially Conservative Na- 
tionalist Party. Before the war his was a rus- 
sophil policy; he was a favorite at the Tsar's 
Court, and represented in the Duma a tendency 
that was relatively reactionary even in that back- 
ward assembly. In Poland, though his party re- 
lied for funds on the big landowners, it won popu- 
lar support by a violent and entirely reckless cam- 
paign against the Jews. To this party belong not 
merely M. Dmowski, by far the cleverest of Polish 
politicians, but also M. Paderewski, and most of 
i the present ministry. From specimens of their 
election literature which I saw, one might suppose 



THE POLISH JEWS 87 

that they fought the first election in free Poland 
mainly on the Jewish issue, combined with the 
subtle suggestion that most Socialists are Jews, 
and all Socialists Bolsheviks. Ugly illustrated 
posters and leaflets, issued officially by this party, 
depicting the Jew as a serpent or a vampire, ap- 
pealed to the numerous illiterate electors, and the 
newspaper press kept the agitation going from 
day to day by incessant anti-Jewish articles. I 
procured copies of some of these sinister popular 
appeals to race-hatred, and in the municipal elec- 
tions a little later actually myself saw a, "N.D." 
car, decorated with all the Allied flags, scattering 
an anti-Jewish leaflet in the main street of War- 
saw. For the present state of mind of brutal 
fanaticism which breaks out in massacre, this rul- 
ing party is directly responsible. Itself at bottom 
the party of the big landed interest, it has used 
anti-Jewish prejudice as a demagogic appeal, in 
order to win the masses from the Socialist and 
Peasant parties. 

I must in fairness mention the charges usually 
advanced against the Jews. There is, of course, 
as everywhere, the charge of usury. Because 
many or most of the town dealers and retailers 
are Jews, they are said to be the causes of high 
prices and the food shortage. In point of fact 
the real reason for the anger of the Polish trad- 
ing class against the Jews, is that their margin of 
profit is so small that even the co-operative so- 
cieties can hardly compete with them. Poland is 



88 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

suffering from an acute currency crisis, but the 
people are too ignorant to understand the real 
causes of the decline of the value of the mark. 
The economic plight of the Polish workers is des- 
perate, mainly because the rise of wages has not 
followed the rise of prices. Prices rose ten times : 
wages only three to five times. No doubt dealers, 
including Jews, did hoard and speculate, but the 
more guilty "profiteer' ' was probably the Polish 
landlord and farmer. It is the obvious cue of 
the profiteer, and the employer who will not raise 
wages, to blame the Jews for the high cost of 
living. Again, they are accused of being pro-Ger- 
man, partly because they rejoiced at the defeat of 
Tsardom, and partly because the Germans, during 
the occupation, found it convenient to employ 
them, since they all speak German. That fact at- 
tracted notice, only because the Eussians had, on 
principle, refused to employ any Jews at all. Half 
Polish society, one is apt to forget, was pro-Ger- 
man, or, as it was called, Activist, until the crash, 
and the President himself, General Pilsudski, 
fought most gallantly on the Austro-German side 
against Russia. Elsewhere it is counted a crime 
that they are neutral in the racial feuds of the 
Poles against the Ukrainians. The most recent 
charge is that all Jews are Bolsheviki. Some 
young Jews are certainly Communists, but 
the mass of the race detests the thought 
of social revolution as it detests every new 
thing. 



THE POLISH JEWS 89 

I will not attempt to describe the successive 
waves of pogroms which have swept over the 
Polish Jews since November last. I happened to 
be in Poland during a relatively quiet interval. I 
saw no pogroms, but I heard enough in my talks 
with Polish officials, officers, and politicians to 
understand the atmosphere of the pogrom. I my- 
self heard the Gendarmerie Commandant of the 
town of Pinsk declare in cold blood that he would 
have to shoot one in ten of the population. About 
ten days later thirty-five Jews were shot in Pinsk 
by the troops without charge or trial. Sometimes 
the number of killed may rise (as at Vilna and 
Lemberg) as high as sixty and seventy, sometimes 
whole streets of Jewish houses are burned down, 
more often there is pillage, beating and insult, but 
little or no killing. I refrain from dwelling on 
this painful subject of pogroms, because, though 
one cannot insist too sharply on their cessation, 
it would be a grave mistake to suppose that they 
are the real evil. Let me say, once, in plain 
language, that these Catholic Polish Christians do 
on occasion, with their troops at their head, mas- 
sacre as brutally as ever Turks massacred 
Christians, and the authorities show a Turkish 
tolerance to these outrages. But pogroms, after 
all, are only the occasional aggravation of a daily 
martyrdom. The same fanaticism shows itself in 
every relation of life. 

Jews have said to me repeatedly that no Chris- 
tian employer will employ a Jew : certainly there 



90 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

are many big employers who on principle exclude 
Jews. A large number of Jews (they are one- 
third of the population), barred out under Rus- 
sian rule, were taken into the service of the War- 
saw tramways during the German occupation. 
They were all instantly dismissed at the Polish 
Eevolution. In a typical country town (I speak 
of what I saw at Vloclawek) the big modern fac- 
tories will employ no Jews. They can work only 
in a few small home-industries of their own. That 
is true also of Lodz. Some of the factories belong 
to Jews, but even in them no Jewish operatives 
can be employed. The fact is that anti-Semitism 
has now filtered down into the working-class. Po- 
lish workmen will not work with Jews. Jewish 
workmen must create their own separate Trade 
Unions. When, at the Revolution, a Workers' 
Council (Rada), on the Soviet model, was created 
in all the towns, the Socialist leaders had the 
greatest difficulty in persuading the Polish work- 
men to admit the Jewish organizations, and when 
I left Poland, at the end of March, they had not 
everywhere succeeded. West of Poland Socialism 
knows no barriers of race. In Poland the Jewish 
Socialists must keep apart, in their own separate 
organization, the Bund. Though the Polish Con- 
stitution imposes no legal disability on the Jew, 
I believe it is the fact that no unbaptized Jews 
(or I shall say, virtually none) have been admit- 
ted to official posts or to any rank in the civil 
service. My note-books are full of little details 



THE POLISH JEWS 91 

of acts of oppression against Jews— interferences 
with their clubs, with their newspaper, and open 
brutality in the street. One heard of these things 
everywhere. The broad facts are enough. No 
Jew was safe from daily insult, while a Chinese 
wall excluded the Jews from every region of 
Polish social life, save in the most advanced cir- 
cles. The whole condition of this society rather 
resembled that of a mixed white and colored com- 
munity than a European land. 

The Poles, politically and culturally an imma- 
ture and backward people, have won the power 
to make their land a hell for its three million 
Jews, by no merit of their own, but simply by the 
victory first of Germans over Russians, and then 
of the Allies over the Germans. What they do to 
other races is some concern of ours. If the diag- 
nosis of this essay be correct then undoubtedly 
the root of the evil, whether Poles or Jews be to 
blame for it, is the excessive isolation of this 
essentially foreign racial element. To conclude, 
however, as the Poles do, that the cure for this 
evil is to bring the Jews into the framework of 
Polish nationality, is surely to betray a complete 
ignorance of the meaning of the idea of nation- 
ality. Race and language are trifles compared 
with the historic gulf between these two peoples. 
Each has suffered, each has struggled, but never 
in the same cause and with the same sentiments. 
Mazzini wrote in vain, if we are going to say 



92 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

that aliens who share none of the traditions, none 
of the memories, none of the hopes, none of the 
religions faith of the Poles, can partake of Polish 
nationality. Good citizens of the Polish State they 
may be, if they are permitted to wish it well, but 
even this they will not be, until the Poles cease 
the effort to beat them into patriotism. None the 
less, this Polish reasoning is sound, in so far as 
it betrays a perception that some social bond, some 
idea of union, some human tie must be discovered, 
if their State, with its three million Jews, is to 
cohere. The bond cannot be nationality. Let 
them seek it in common work. In this modern 
world, it is much more important that men pro- 
duce, shoulder to shoulder, and share common in- 
terests as workers and creators, than it is that 
they profess the same historic nationality. When 
Jewish workers are admitted to every factory and 
to the civil service, when the separate Trade 
Unions, and the separate Socialist workers' 
parties fuse, the Jewish problem will be solved 
in Poland. Liberalism, one may say in passing, 
exists in Poland neither as an idea nor as a party. 
The idea of Socialism and its work for common 
human ends, free from this curse of racial fanati- 
cism, is the one force in Poland which gives any 
hope for the future, and it is only in so far as the 
weak and backward Polish Socialism movement 
grows in courage and numbers and fidelity to its 
ideas, that any radical solution can be found for 
the Jewish Droblem. 



THE POLISH JEWS 93 

Failing this radical social solution none of the 
obvious remedies seems to me particularly hope- 
ful. The political vote is useless to the Jews. 
Jewish parties were and are sharply divided into 
many groups with divergent policies. The Ortho- 
dox stand by themselves. Their Socialists are at 
war with their middle-class. They were often 
robbed of their voting chances by skilfully ar- 
ranged electoral areas. But if they had won a 
proportionate number of seats in the Diet, their 
case would have been rather worse than better. 
If they had become a balancing party, with a big 
vote to sell, the answer to this use of power would 
have been only a sharper application of the rod 
of persecution. In some of the Eadas (Work- 
men's Councils) they had this balancing power 
between the Left (Communists) and Right (Po- 
lish Socialist Party), and they hardly dared to 
use it, because they knew that any act or decision 
which would cause it to be said that Jews are 
exerting a political influence, would only expose 
them to further persecution. It is dangerous to. 
be a Jew, but most dangerous of all to be a Jew 
who can be accused of wielding power. 

If it is of their rights as a minority that one 
thinks, then obviously it is important that they 
should have their own schools, which must re- 
ceive their fair share of public money. The con- 
trol of these schools ought to be in the hands of 
the Jewish community, on a democratic basis. 
While they clearly ought to teach the Polish 



94 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

language and history, the instruction must begin 
in the mother-tongue, which is Yiddish. Cultural 
autonomy on these lines is a right which must be 
secured to every minority in Europe. 

It is on this matter of schools that controversy 
mainly turns in Poland. To me it seems curiously 
unreal. Here is a race liable to be massacred on 
occasion, habitually insulted in its daily life, ex- 
cluded in fact from the State's service, and barely 
able to live by minor crafts and petty trade, be- 
cause it is excluded by sheer fanaticism from the 
chief industries, and we offer it as a solution — 
Jewish schools. The League of Nations, we are 
told, will impose certain obligations on the Polish 
State in regard to its Jews. The League as it 
exists to-day is primarily a Grand Alliance. Po- 
land feels herself an ally, and is regarded in Paris 
as the indispensable barrier against Germany and 
Russia. French officers are training and even 
commanding its army. French diplomacy, 
strongly clerical in its tendencies, is the only ef- 
fective representative of Europe or the League 
in Warsaw to-day. The Allies failed to stop the 
little war of the Poles against the Ukrainians. 
They will fail, even if they try, to stop the perse- 
cution of the Jews. No Alliance ever yet con- 
trived to control an ally. From an ally one wants 
an army, not virtue. While the League remains 
a militant alliance against the Germans and Bol- 
sheviks, it will achieve nothing for the Polish 
Jews, or for any other minority. It will no more 



THE POLISH JEWS 95 

succeed in controlling the Poles in this matter 
than Mid- Victorian England in the Crimean days 
could control the Turks, while it regarded them 
as allies. Its diplomatic agents will move in Po- 
lish society, where no one meets a Jew, and only 
a very strong and exceptional man will risk his 
local popularity for the sake of the Jews. To 
place minorities (be they German or Jewish) 
under Poles and Tchechs, and then to imagine that 
all will be well because some magic League of Na- 
tions will watch over them, is a pitiable self-de- 
ception. The Poles understand very well what 
their role in Europe is. Their role is to fill a 
rather onerous part in the French strategy of en- 
circlement, and to keep a strong conscript army 
on the Vistula, while the French keep watch on 
the Rhine. They know very well that if they fill 
this role, they may treat Jews, Germans, and 
other minorities as they please. That is a corol- 
lary of the new militarism. The way of escape! 
I see none from this false start. But more and 
more, day by day, the Polish Jew, like every 
wronged race and class in Europe, will seek his 
salvation in Socialism. 

On one fact, however, it is not too late to insist. 
The boundaries of Poland have not yet been drawn 
on its Eastern side. Its armies are occupying the 
country beyond the Bug, but as yet they have no 
formal " mandate. " Here the Jewish population 
is even denser than in Poland proper. Brest, 
Vilna, Pinsk, and the rest, are overwhelmingly 



96 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

Jewish towns. This is the old Eussian "Pale," 
in which even the villages are often Jewish, and 
since the devastation of 1915, when the Cossacks 
drove out the Orthodox peasants, the Jews have 
even taken to tilling the soil. One might press 
this case as strongly from the Lithuanian, the 
White Eussian or the Ukrainian standpoint, for 
the Polish population here is a negligible minority. 
All these races will be wronged, but more especi- 
ally the Jews, if the Polish frontier is drawn be- 
yond the true Polish racial limits. I know a town 
in the Pale which had lived under Tsarist Eussian, 
German, Ukrainian, Bolshevist, and Polish rule. 
I asked the local Jews which, from their stand- 
point, was the best and the worse. They had noth- 
ing, as Jews, against Germans or Bolsheviki. 
Neither persecuted. They all agreed that Polish 
rule was decidedly worse than that of Tsardom. 
The leaders of the Ukrainians, I imagine, would 
have said the same thing if I could have questioned 
them, but they were all in prison. 



vn 

POLAND AS BAERIER 

As I write, the Polish Constituent Assembly is en- 
gaged in discussing two resolutions which express 
the will of the Polish nation to conclude an alli- 
ance and a military convention with the Powers of 
the Entente. London seems incredibly far away, 
and New York as distant as the next century. It 
is not easy to bring this resolution into any rela- 
tion with the projects of disarmament and a 
League of Nations which still, one gathers, occupy 
public opinion at home. 1 For the average edu- 
cated Pole the League of Nations is at best a 
doubtful dream. The reality is that Poland con- 
trived in the first months of her existence to in- 
volve herself in war with all her neighbors on all 
four fronts at once. Talk to a Pole of the League 
of Nations, and he will answer that the idea is 
alluring, but will it guard his four frontiers? The 

1 1 wrote this under the belief that Alliances and the League 
are incompatible, or as Mr. Wilson put it, that there must be 
" no league, alliance, or special covenants or understandings 
within the general and common family of the League of Nations." 
I even supposed that he meant what he said, when he declared 
that he would join " no combination of power which is not a 
combination of all of us." Clearly an alliance of France with 
Poland, Bohemia, and Roumania is no worse than an alliance 
of Britain and America with France. 

97 



98 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

idea of an impartial League may possess a certain 
sublimity, but he prefers a sure friend to a just 
judge. 

On public occasions it is of the Entente that the 
Poles are accustomed to speak. In private they 
talk only of France. Indeed, when one travels 
in Central Europe, in Vienna as in Warsaw, one 
perceives that of all the Allies, it is France alone 
that counts. Hers is the dominant army, hers is 
the coveted alliance. It is not too much to say 
that she is in process of establishing a military 
hegemony over Europe. The Poles propose to 
place themselves under the supreme command of 
Marshal Foch, and expect the early arrival of a 
French staff to instruct, and in effect to control, 
the Polish army. The idea of a military conven- 
tion is universally accepted. Poland has accepted 
the role which Allied oratory and the Allied Press 
assign to her. She is to be the "barrier" of "civi- 
lization" against Germany on the one hand and 
Eussia on the other. Whether the actual military 
convention with France, will specifically pledge her 
to act against Eussia, as well as against Ger- 
many, is not yet known. In any event she receives 
her place in the ring of little States, which are to 
receive their marching orders from Paris. Ger- 
many will once again adjust herself to the old 
prospect of a war on both fronts, and the Poles 
proudly prepare themselves for the role of "bar- 
rier" that has been assigned to them. In the 
French military system Poland occupies the place 
which Eussia has vacated. She is the Eastern 
half of the mechanism of encirclement. That old 



POLAND AS BARRIER 99 

saying of Napoleon's, that Poland is "the key- 
stone of the European arch," is current once 
more. The magic of the old Napoleonic tradition 
still works, and Polish families count with im- 
mense satisfaction the ancestors who were loyal 
even at Leipzig. The youth of Poland is not fa- 
tigued by years of war as the rest of Europe is. 
Its romantic impulse is unsatisfied, and Poland 
aspires to play her part in Europe— even the part 
of a barrier. 

One cannot live for a month among this gentle 
and hospitable people without acquiring a keen 
sympathy for them. In me it works critically. 
This role which the Allies propose — or the only 
Ally with whom men seem to reckon here — may 
seem to the Poles an honor. To me it rings like a 
doom. Five and twenty millions of Poles amply 
provided with the causes, if not with the means, 
of strife are to face sixty million Germans in the 
West and a hundred million Russians in the East. 
The last intention which Nature was aware of, 
when Poland emerged from the glaciers, was to 
make of it a barrier. From Germany, across the 
whole land inhabited by Poles, stretches an almost 
featureless plain. A more dreary and monotonous 
landscape in winter I have never seen. The Rus- 
sians in their barbaric way were right. The only 
way to make an effective barrier of Poland is to 
devastate it, as in 1812 and again in 1915 they 
devastated its eastern region. If the Poles realize 
their economic plans, that pitiable defense is gone. 
The legendary Polish mud will be traversed by 



100 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

causeways. Eailways will lead to every lonely 
village. Canals will drain the waterlogged soil, 
and even the famous marshes of the Pripet will 
be dry. Such a Poland would be no barrier, but 
rather a broad highway. Then, of course, it is the 
manhood of Poland which will be the wall. The 
French are good instructors. If one assumes that 
a partly ruined France can afford to create a mod- 
ern army in Poland, with all the necessary forti- 
fications and war-industries, the thing can in time 
be done — always provided that Poland receives 
her naval port at Danzig, and, on either side of 
the roads that lead to it, controls no mere "corri- 
dor" but a broad defensible territory. 

Let no one suppose, however, that the creation 
of this Polish army will be morally or materially 
an easy task. To-day this army lacks everything 
save spirit. One may see the young recruits in 
Warsaw marching through the streets with the 
"Waacs," and those fantastic Polish bluejackets 
who constitute a navy without ships. They sing 
as they march old songs and new, sad songs and 
gay, for this race is gifted in its emotional life. 
It sings itself into its four wars, ready to win 
again the laurels of prowess which history, a nig- 
gard in all else, has never denied to the Poles. I 
saw two companies at Pinsk march out against the 
Bolsheviki. It was night ; a bitter east wind was 
blowing, and the tread of the men rang on ground 
frozen by many degrees of frost. They had no 
greatcoats and no blankets. Some had no uni- 



POLAND AS BARRIER 101 

forms, and some had no shirts. Their rifles were 
of three patterns. Their rations were one tin of 
soup, a little bread, and a little substitute-coffee 
daily. Morally, the army, for all its superb pa- 
triotism, is somewhat divided. One school, the 
young democratic element, trained in General Pil- 
sudski's Legion, fought on the side of the Central 
Powers, because for them Tsarist Russia was the 
enemy of enemies. The senior officers, however, 
for the most part are Poles from beyond the 
borders, sons of landowning families, who made 
a military career in the Russian army. They are 
steeped in Russian traditions of discipline, imbued 
with the Russian aristocrat's attitude towards the 
peasant and the private, disposed to intervene in 
strikes with the knout. They have, in a word, 
the mind of the V White Guards." Two years ago 
these Legionaries and these Russo-Polish officers 
were facing each other in the trenches at Pinsk. 
To-day they are creating a Polish army. One 
school or the other will dominate. 

What, next, is the economic plight of this people 
which is invited to make of itself a rampart! Its 
industry stands still. The cotton mills of Lodz 
have been idle for four years. 1 On the books of 



1 In March the British Economic Mission to Poland recom- 
mended the instant supply of adequate raw materials to restart 
the textile industry ruined by the blockade. By the end of June 
some cotton had arrived, supplied by the Americans. The British 
Wool Control, though admittedly we had ample and indeed 
excessive stocks, refused to supply any for Poland. The difficulty 
was credit. 



102 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the labor exchanges there are already of unem- 
ployed urban workers and their dependents a 
quarter or even a third of the population of the 
towns. Food prices have risen from ten to twelve 
times. Wages have risen from four to five times. 
The most careful calculation which sociologists 
and doctors can make, goes to show that, for a 
family of five, food alone ought to cost, for bare 
subsistence, 17 to 20 marks daily. That calcula- 
tion includes neither meat nor butter, neither tea 
nor coffee. Add a matter of 5 marks for other 
needs (heat, light, clothes, rent) and one reaches 
a total of 25 marks for daily needs. The unskilled 
laborer in the towns earns at most 15 marks. It 
is only the most highly paid individuals in the 
most skilled trades who ever reach this subsist- 
ence minimum of 25 marks. The unemployed may 
buy bread, potatoes, and fuel with their daily dole 
of 5 marks for a maximum family but that is all 
that they can buy. A temporary condition, you 
will say? But some of the factories amdestroyed, 
as much by Eussians as by Germans. Week by 
week returning prisoners, deportees, and seasonal 
workers pour back from Eussia and from Ger- 
many. They crowd together in any available 
shelter, dirty, unclad, half-fed, and typhus takes 
its toll. Their numbers will add hundreds of 
thousands yet to the total of the unemployed. 

There is in "Congress" Poland itself nearly 
enough food to go round, if the administration 
were strong enough to deal with the hoarder and 



POLAND AS BARRIER 103 

the profiteer. Across the River Bug the starving 
country begins and stretches eastwards till it 
melts into the misery of Russia. There the barrier 
reels with hunger. This eastern zone, which is the 
barrier against Russia, is not even Polish. The 
Polish minority is a fraction. The town popula- 
lation is chiefly Jewish, the peasants Ukrainians, 
or "White" Russians. The Polish garrison has 
no illusions about the attitude of these races. To 
secure itself against a hostile population, it has 
no expedient but force. 

The real Poland, the true Pole will tell you, is 
neither in the Borderland nor yet in the towns. 
The peasants are the Polish nation. I have been 
in the villages, and though they have a bare suf- 
ficiency of coarse food, their discontent is even 
more active than that of the townsmen. Nowhere 
in many wanderings, not even in Turkey or the 
West of Ireland, have I seen farm laborers living 
in such misery. By unspeakable roads, mere 
tracks of mud or sand, one approaches the manor- 
house, in which the whole civilization of the 
country-side is concentrated. Here alone is there 
comfort and wealth. One finds in the stables blood 
horses and pedigree cattle housed with every at- 
tention to hygiene. It has not occurred as yet to 
the Polish aristocrat to reckon his laborers' cot- 
tages among the amenities of his estate. These 
cottages, in the relatively prosperous district 
which I visited (Vloclawek), were all built upon 
the same plan, on estate after estate. A low and 



104 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

often dilapidated square cottage is divided into 
four rooms. In each of these rooms an entire 
family, which may number from four to nine per- 
sons, is housed. The rooms are squalid, the furni- 
ture scanty, the bedding thin and dirty. The floor 
is usually of beaten clay. The ground round the 
houses is something between a morass and a dung 
heap, and the pig sleeps with the family at night, 
for fear of robbers. Sanitation there is none. 
The money wages may reach the magnificent sum 
of 80 marks a year — which in these days would 
buy two shirts. 

There is, of course, in addition some payment in 
kind — grain, potatoes, and pasturage for a cow — 
but there is also the obligation to find or to hire 
a youth as assistant laborer. 1 It rarely happens 
in these days that the milk or butter from that 
cow can be spared for the laborer's children. The 
case of the peasant who owns a small but insuf- 
ficient holding is in some ways rather worse. He 

i In this primitive system of labor definitely servile con- 
ditions survive. The landlord considers, when he hires and houses 
a laborer, that he has a right to the services of his whole family. 
If the laborer has no child of working age, he is expected to 
hire a youth, boy or girl, as assistant (posylka). He must him- 
self feed and house this posylka, and this youth must sleep with 
the married couple in their one room. The rate at which the 
laborer hires the posylka is much higher than the wage which 
the landlord pays on his account. I reckoned, after full in- 
quiry, that the laborer has often a deficit of 100 marks a 
year on account of the wages of the posylka, without reckoning 
his keep. He balances this loss only by selling all the produce 
of his cow. 



POLAND AS BARRIER 105 

goes out as a day-]aborer at 1% marks a day, and 
there is no extra payment in kind for him S 
peasant with a dwarf-holding is even more 'easily 

"Z "ITS migrati ° n " — a " times to Ger- 
many and the permanent emigration to both 
Americas, the landlord has always had a teeming 
labor-market at his eommand. "in the last 72 
of peace no less than 358,000 migratory labor s 
SS T" 117 f ° r the a ^ icul tural season, and 
llf 000 P° C ° UntrieS - Exdusive of ^ iews, 

?ntted 4° 6S em n gTated * the Same ^ ear to the 
United States. One must also reckon the miners 

who worked m the Westphalian and Belgian coal 

fea ' S the' Gm HT tS Wh ° W6nt t0 Sou th Amet 
Z .i ll 3 , r future most of these outlets will 
be closed, for the Polish State has forbidden the 

s^tr^ laborers to « w^: 

tne United States proposes to stop emigration for 
four years The exodus to France winbe n 
couraged but it will not balance the closin. of 
other fields for this immense export of labor* A 
onsiderable development of industry wouW ab 
sorb some of this surplus labor, but neither the 
capital nor the technical skill for any great ext n 
«on of manufacture exists in Poland : th s so b 

A n\mir " "f^' ** be ^ dual ^ 2£ 
An improvement in the methods of agriculture 



106 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

would go far to employ this floating population. 
Cultivation in Poland is still very primitive : it is 
reckoned that whereas in Silesia sixty days of 
labor in the year are required to cultivate an acre, 
in Galicia the average is only forty days. Better 
farming, on that showing, might employ three 
men, where two suffice to-day. But, undoubtedly, 
the tendency will be to seek a solution in the col- 
onization of the non-Polish Eastern Borderland 
with Polish settlers. It is commonly said that 
this country is sparsely peopled, but on the other 
hand the soil is sandy and there is much marsh 
and forest. From this area also laborers used to 
migrate and emigrate. A considerable portion of 
the population fled into Eussia during the war, 
and its rights deserve prior consideration. As- 
suredly the native population will not welcome 
Polish settlers. On the other hand, the Polish 
landed class has every interest in diverting the 
land-hunger of their own peasants to this region, 
for they hope in this way to weaken the demand 
for the partition of their own estates by satisfying 
it at the expense of proprietors in the East. The 
Imperialism of the Poles, who claim all these non- 
Polish lands, which once were subject to their his- 
toric Kingdom, is more than an antiquarian senti- 
mentalism. It has its real root in the pressure of 
population in overcrowded Poland. Its satisfac- 
tion would delay agrarian reform in Poland, and 
make in the Borderland itself a bitter racial war. 
The countryside has been in ferment since the 



POLAND AS BARRIER 107 

Germans marched away last November. Organ- 
ized by the Peasants' Party (Populists), a vigor- 
ous radical class-organization, the rural workers, 
small-holders and landless laborers alike, have 
acted boldly and acted together. At first they con- 
centrated on a demand for a "war bonus" — a 
lump sum usually fixed at 300 marks (£6 at the 
present exchange) which would bring them some 
small share of the landowner's wartime prosper- 
ity, and enable them to buy a few clothes or boots. 
Many of them received a fraction of what they 
asked. Then came a w T hole series of more con- 
structive demands, for a 600 mark yearly money 
wage, for two-room cottages, for the abolition of 
the hired assistant system, for free schools and 
free medical attendance. Strikes have been con- 
tinuous all over the country, but since the strikers 
could rarely bring themselves to neglect the land- 
lord's cattle, a strike in winter meant little. The 
real struggle will begin next month (April). That 
is only the foreground of the agrarian question in 
Poland. Behind these urgent demands there is 
the far more formidable agitation for the parti- 
tion of big estates. Everywhere in eastern 
Europe the feudal system is crumbling. The Po- 
lish peasants are no more Bolsheviki than were the 
Land Leaguers who followed Davitt and Parnell, 
but they are no less in earnest. They are intensely 
Catholic. Their tradition of loyalty, not to say 
servility, to masters seemed unshakable. But this 
winter the laborer who on Monday bowed almost 



108 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

to the ground as he doffed his cap to his master, 
was on some estates capable on Tuesday of lock- 
ing his master up, until he accepted the new 
charter of rights. The two Peasant groups in 
the Diet propose, with the support of the Social- 
ists, to break up all estates for subdivision among 
the landless laborers and the owners of uneco- 
nomic holdings. They would leave to the land- 
lord no more than 200 or 150 morgen (100 or 75 
acres), which they regard as the maximum which 
any one owner should be allowed to possess. Be- 
side this main demand they ask also for the di- 
vision of Church and State lands and of the con- 
fiscated Russian estates. The various land- 
owners' parties are ready for one degree of com- 
promise or another, but none of them will concede 
what is likely to satisfy the peasants. The 
struggle will be acute, but the peasants will 
win. 

In this rapid inventory of the human contents 
of the Polish barrier, space fails me for details, 
but I cannot omit the Jews. . It is, I am afraid, no 
exaggeration to say that the whole of Polish so- 
ciety in all classes is now deeply impregnated with 
anti-Semitism. More serious by far than the 
pogroms, is the daily round of insult and violence 
and the denial of economic opportunity which the 
Jews must endure. The Jews are 14 per cent, of 
the population of " Congress' ' Poland, and out- 
side it, if "historical" Poland is to form the new 
State, the proportion is much higher. The for- 



POLAND AS BARRIER 109 

cible assimilation of this immense alien mass is 
grotesquely impossible. The liberalism which 
will recognize its reasonable claim for its own self- 
governing schools, and translate the present legal 
equality into a real equality, finds but a feeble ex- 
pression in the political world. 

The unique feature of Polish politics is, indeed, 
that in all its many groups there is none which 
calls itself, and none which deserves to be called, 
liberal. The little middle-class group failed to 
return a single member, and plainly it has no 
future. The "National Democrats,' ' subsidized 
by the landowners, thrive by anti-Semitism and 
Chauvinism. The Socialists are of the right wing, 
opportunist, inclined to nationalism, and withal 
few in numbers. The Peasants ' Party (Populists) 
is a class agrarian organization. The few "intel- 
lectuals" who belong to it are idealists, but their 
influence is limited. This party, by far the most 
interesting and characteristic group in Polish 
politics, has to its credit a great work for 
education, even in the days of Russian rule. 
Its propagandists (like those of the Socialist 
Party) struggled, with the Tsar's secret police 
ever on their track, to keep alive the flame 
of nationality, to teach something of Polish his- 
tory, to educate the illiterate peasantry, and to 
promote the agrarian Co-operative Movement. 
Generous and romantic, these patriots had often 
to face Siberia, and none of them would have 
risked this life of devotion, unless they had had 



110 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

something of the knight errant in their blood. 
One of these ladies, now a deputy, used to teach 
Polish history in the girls' schools of Warsaw, 
but the subject was forbidden, and the lesson was 
given under the disguise of a course in dressmak- 
ing. These pioneers, most of them at one time 
Socialists, are now engaged in educating the 
party, which is represented in the Diet by genuine 
horny-handed peasants, who wear their national 
dress. Five days a week these peasant deputies 
attend lectures on history, literature, and eco- 
nomics in their club. All that is good and much 
that is evil in Poland seems to have its root in 
romance. Yesterday this secret conspirators' 
struggle with Tsardom: to-day the four wars for 
the historic frontier. 

I will conclude my inventory with the Bolshe- 
viki 7 or Communists, as they are called here. 
They manage to elect about one-third of the dele- 
gates of the Workers' Councils. In spite of the 
preventive arrest of most of their leaders, and the 
suppression of their newspapers, their numbers 
certainly grow among the unemployed. In War- 
saw, where certain Trade Unions are definitely 
Communist, and others Socialist, Catholic, or Jew- 
ish, the unemployed belonging to the Communist 
group were in February one in five in relation to 
the total number. As yet, however, their efforts 
are shattered on the solid patriotism of the Po- 
lish workers. Their attempt to organize a two 
days' demonstration strike a fortnight ago, at a 



POLAND AS BARRIER 111 

moment of grave military danger, was a failure, 
save in two advanced districts. None the less they 
have their crucial importance. They serve the 
Polish reaction as an invaluable bogey. Every day 
the State is in dire peril. Every day the clamor 
for fresh measures of repression grows louder. 
Every day the Diet listens to detailed stories of 
the excesses of the armed gendarmerie (formed 
on the Russian tradition), and after listening, it 
votes for further restrictions and severities. The 
reaction is striking behind the Communists at the 
whole working-class movement. 

When I walk about in the slums of Warsaw and 
Lodz, watch the bread queues, glance at the 
crowded one-room dwellings from which all but 
the last sticks of furniture are gone, when I see 
the pinched and listless children, or study sta- 
tistics of the almost vanished birth-rate, and the 
death-rate swollen by typhus, I marvel that Po- 
land is not revolutionary. There are several rea- 
sons. It is intensely Catholic. Again, it has not 
learned by active war how easy it is to kill. 1 Bol- 

i In a Polish country town, shortly after the departure of the 
Germans, the local militia caught a group of smugglers with a 
rich booty. Shortly after, it allowed them to escape. "But you 
had rifles," their superiors objected; "Why did you not shoot?" 
"Would you have us kill men for a bale of smuggled goods?" 
was the answer. In Frankfurt this spring, the authorities tried 
to arrest a woman in the market-place for selling illicit lottery 
tickets. Her clients resisted, and presently began to shoot. The 
shooting spread all over the town, and lasted for two or three 
days until it came at length to machine guns. The Germans 
have acquired the habit of killing. Even the Poles are learning 
it now, 



112 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

shevism to the average Pole appears only as a 
new phase of the familiar Eussian peril. Three 
years ago the Eussians quitted Poland, as Poles 
intend, for ever. Once more they threaten her 
borders, and simple Poles think of Trotsky and 
his Eed Army only as the successors of the Tsar 
and his Cossacks. Bolshevism is not merely a 
foreign doctrine, it is a Eussian doctrine, and it 
comes with arms in its hands. Amid its manifold 
perils the tribal instinct that unites the Polish 
race is stronger by far than the class instinct that 
divides. But, above all, Poland hopes. Eussia, 
Germany, Hungary were gripped by despair. Po- 
land has risen from the tomb, and beyond the 
trials of to-day it sees a glorious resurrection. 
But the resurrection of what! If the barrier is 
put to an early test, with its defenseless frontiers, 
its unclad army, its hunger zone beyond the Bug, 
its half- starved unemployed, its wronged peasants 
wakening from the drugged sleep of centuries, its 
Jews the one hopeless element in these millions, 
is there a chance that the dikes will hold? If the 
perilous moment goes by, is the prospect better if 
Poland, ruling it may be, her three million an- 
nexed Germans, her five million unassimilated 
Jews, her hostile Lithuanian and Ukrainian sub- 
jects, consolidates herself under French instruc- 
tion as a military power? How long, even with 
iron discipline, could such a state stand as a 
barrier, when at length the delayed wave broke 
from east or west? 



POLAND AS BARRIER 113 

Danzig is the symbol of the choice. If Danzig 
is annexed, it will be because the Allies have as- 
signed to Poland this perilous military role. If 
Danzig remains a German city, and Poland se- 
cures only " those indisputably Polish popula- 
tions' ' promised her in the Fourteen Points, her 
military role indeed is over, but her hope of 
peaceful evolution begins. Let the Allies pour in 
their food and their raw materials. Let them 
meet tins scourge of hunger and unemployment by 
ample grants and loans of money. They cannot 
do too much for this stricken and infinitely pa- 
tient people. To Poland they can give only one 
fatal gift — the means of embarking on an imperia- 
list career. Let them bid her live on good terms 
with her neighbors, and seek her future rather as 
a link than as a barrier. 1 The barrier, if Allied 
strategists rely upon it, will crumble away at the 
first serious shock. 

Wabsaw, March 30th. 

i Barrier, unhappily, it is to be. The Entente decided that in 
order to obtain access to the sea, Poland must annex a broad 
" corridor " leading to Danzig. That city, though it secures 
autonomy, comes also under Polish sovereignty. In order to 
make a broad, strategic corridor, some purely German towns 
and some predominantly German districts are included. A Ger- 
man minority (between two and three millions) will be subject 
to Polish conscription. East Prussia is left as an isolated 
German island. Plebiscites are to decide the future of Upper 
Silesia and of parts of East Prussia. That is well, but they are 
apt to be under Allied, not neutral supervision, and a strange 
provision requires the dissolution of the Workers' Councils in 
these areas. In any event, under present conditions, a vote for 
German citizenship is a vote to share in ruin. Even more inde- 
fensible is the decision to annex to Poland Eastern Galicia, with 
its Ukrainian population, and its desirable oil-wells. 



vni 

AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 

A traveler who is trying to form an idea of the 
trend of thought in a strange country has several 
methods open to him. He may attend meetings 
and read newspapers and pamphlets with diligence. 
He may seek out the abler men and women in 
politics and probe them with questions. He may 
listen, silently if possible, to the voices of the 
street. I used all these methods during a three 
weeks' stay in Germany. In the end, after many 
interviews and much reading, I left off where I 
began. Entering Germany from Austria, and 
wandering with many stoppages for three days 
and nights over the inconceivably disorganized 
railways of Bavaria and Saxony, I had the chance 
of listening to the talk of dozens of fellow-travel- 
ers, who came and went in the crowded carriages. 
Two conversations stand out in my memory as 
typical. A group of Bavarian ladies from a little 
country town had been telling of the civil war, and 
the lack of food, and of their efforts to clothe 
themselves and feed their children. "It is far 
worse than the war, ' ' said one of them. ' ' During 
the war we had hope. We knew it must end one 

114 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 115 

day. Now there is no hope." The other conver- 
sation began at Leipzig, in a carriage fnll of obvi- 
ously well-to-do people, including a major and 
a colonel 's wife. They discussed the forecasts of 
the coming peace from Paris, and for a long time 
what they said was conventional. No people 
could accept these terms and live: it was ruin, 
moral, political, and financial. It meant the end 
of Germany. Suddenly a handsome elderly man 
in the corner, a manufacturer as it turned out, 
intervened with something like this speech : ' 'Well, 
you know, we set a very bad example. Don't 
forget what we did at Brest. The Entente is do- 
ing to us as we did to Russia. The real authors 
of this tragedy are Ludendorff and the Kaiser.' ' 
I expected an angry protest. There was none. 
" That's true," came from two or three of the 
passengers. The soldier sat silent. The colonel's 
wife began to abuse the Crown Prince. 

Up to the publication of the draft treaty these 
two conversations in the train would serve as a 
clue to German thinking. Two strands ran 
through it, a black abysmal hopelessness, and an 
almost morbid self-blame. Omitting the impeni- 
tent pan-German newspapers, whose influence is 
negligible, Vorwarts and the liberal Berliner 
Tageblatt had dropped the old attempts to mini- 
mize the responsibility of Germany's rulers for 
the war, and references to the contributory guilt 
of others were confined to qualifying phrases in 
parentheses. The condemnation of the violation 



116 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

of Belgium, the devastation of the Somme, and 
the U-boat excesses was general, and manifestly 
sincere. There was a real effort to understand 
the attitude of the Entente in these matters. The 
official offer to raise a corps of volunteer laborers 
to repair the havoc in France and Belgium was 
more than a tactical move designed to facilitate 
the return of the prisoners of war. German opin- 
ion is ashamed of Ludendorff 's performances, and 
wishes not only to separate itself from them, but 
even to do penance for them. 

My last impression of Berlin was of a city 
visibly hesitating between the old world and the 
new. The Majority Socialists had summoned a 
meeting of protest against a Peace of Violence. 
In the vast Konigsplatz and on the steps of the 
Eeichstag a crowd had assembled which would 
fill Trafalgar Square three times over. The outer 
scene recalled the past. The ugly gilded figure of 
Victory was still poised on her pillar, and she 
glittered in the sun, as she has glittered on every 
day of spring since the "crowning mercy' ' of 
Sedan. Moltke turned his stone back to the crowd. 
The hideous wooden idol of Hindenburg lowered 
like some sullen African fetish above the more 
civilized vulgarities of Hohenzollern architecture. 
But there were red flags on the pedestal of 
Moltke 's statue. On the platform of the colossal 
Hindenburg a frail little woman, one of the So- 
cialist deputies, was making a glowing if some- 
what sentimental speech, in which she predicted 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 117 

the early triumph of the principle of love over the 
principles of violence and hate. On the steps of 
the Reichstag, an oldish man, with a marvelously 
clear voice, Herr Fischer, Socialist Deputy in the 
Reichstag, held the attention of at least 5,000 men 
and women. I could hardly believe my ears as he 
passed from the more conventional denunciations 
of this peace, which cuts deep into the living body 
of the German people, and condemns it to slavery 
for a generation, to a frank handling of the in- 
iquities of the war. He told his audience that 
they must be prepared to pay, innocent though 
they might be, for LudendorfFs crimes. He de- 
nounced the violation of Belgium, without a syl- 
lable of excuse or reservation. When he came to 
speak of the devastation of the Somme area he 
spared no detail. He bade his hearers imagine 
the sensations of the French peasant as he returns 
to this desert, and dwelt on the deliberate malice 
which had ruined not only the houses but the fruit 
trees. He insisted that all this must be made good 
to the last pfennig, and told the crowd that if they 
did not like the prospect, they must blame Luden- 
dorff and not the Allies. Fischer is no exceptional 
man, a trusted follower of Scheidemann. The 
resolution contained this remarkable sentence : 

The German people is ready to do penance (biissen) for the 
sins of its former rulers, and to repair all the wrong that has 
been done. 

That cannot have been an easy sentence to write 



118 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

at a moment when the whole people is smarting 
under the sense that in this peace the Allies have 
surpassed in cold-blooded brutality the worst 
precedents of Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest. 

English opinion is puzzled by the survival of 
certain compromised personalities in politics, but 
Herr Erzberger, for example, has to his credit a 
long and determined struggle against the U-boat 
campaign. The newspaper kiosques in Unter den 
Linden, in railway stations and even in hotels, 
displayed an infinite variety of pacifist pamphlets, 
which had a ready sale, while in the street hawkers 
were shouting every evening the title of a big 
pamphlet which explained "how our rulers lied 
us into the war." To this overwhelming current 
of opinion there was virtually no resistance. 
Among the Independent Socialists and the paci- 
fists of long standing this tendency to put the 
whole blame for the war on the former rulers of 
Germany was so uncritical and so simple-minded, 
that few of them realized even faintly the menace 
of the Entente's imperialism. A fortnight ago 
Mr. Wilson's name was mentioned everywhere 
with veneration, and, stranger still, I met Ger- 
mans who were startled and almost shocked be- 
cause I did not share their admiration for Mr. 
Lloyd George. This mood visibly passed with 
the publication of the treaty. What Germans saw 
in it was above all a cold-blooded project for the 
destruction of a commercial competitor. The cu- 
rious thing, however, about the comments on this 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 119 

cruel document was that few of them (I except 
the Vossische Zeitung) were definitely anti-Eng- 
lish. The moral drawn, even in clerical newspa- 
pers, and by the popular Center leader Giesberts, 
was that "capitalism' ' had in this treaty un- 
masked itself. 

For the extinction of all hope and energy in the 
German people, the continuation of the blockade 
during the last seven months is chiefly to blame. 
At the moment when the ho$e, I will not say of 
victory, but even of a balanced, negotiated peace, 
vanished suddenly, there was just one chance for 
the sanity of an unhappy people. That chance 
was work. We denied it, not merely by withhold- 
ing food (which began to arrive, but only in small 
quantities, in April), but even more by denying 
raw materials. The chief industries were at a 
standstill. Swedish ores were for the first time 
cut off by the blockade, and with them the iron of 
Lorraine. I saw the textile towns of Saxony, with 
their forests of mill chimneys that smoked no 
longer. If it was true of millions of workmen 
that they could not work, it was true of others 
that they would not. 1 The motive to work was 
absent. Wages were useless, for there was little 
to buy. Clothing was prohibitive in price. The 

1 Urgent official posters in all towns exhorted the urban un- 
employed to betake themselves to the plenty of the country. 
They did not go; as some said, because they would not; as 
others said, because the Junker landowners would take no work- 
men from the towns, infected as these were supposed to be with 
Communism. 



120 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

stimulus of innocent pleasure was withdrawn. 
One cannot buy coffee or tea or tobacco (the best 
shops advertise a mixture containing 30 per 
cent.). There is practically no sugar or butter, 
and the jam is a nasty concoction of turnips. Why 
work, if wages will buy nothing? The unemployed 
allowance would just suffice to buy the inadequate 
rations of bread, meat, and potatoes. Since work 
was denied, the mind of the worker sought other 
interests. Some gambled — one sees them engaged 
in it at every street corner. More turned to poli- 
tics. Eestless, disillusioned, yet grasping at any 
new hope, they first expected that a government 
with a majority of Socialist Ministers would at 
least make a beginning in socializing industry. 
The Scheidemann Cabinet did nothing of the kind, 
nor has it, I believe, any intention of doing any- 
thing. It pleads financial difficulties, says this is 
a bad time to begin, deploys the obstructive pru- 
dence so natural to the "moderate.' ' It has gone 
so far in resisting proposals to " socialize' ' suit- 
able industries, that even the liberal Berliner 
Tageblatt and Frankfurter Zeitung have begun to 
blame its inaction. As the workmen saw Parlia- 
ment withdraw itself to Weimar, there to lose 
itself in interminable committee-work over the 
Constitution, they lost faith in the old parlia- 
mentary forms. The demand for some form of 
" Soviet' ' as a recognized part of the Constitution 
became irresistible. With some a mere fashion, 
with others a mode of expressing discontent, with 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 121 

others again a real constructive idea, the Soviet 
had become a symbol of revolt. The crushing of 
Spartacus in no way weakened the movement. 
The only result of the demonstration that armed 
revolt is destined to defeat, has been to promote 
the strike. All the strikers, from the miners of 
the Ruhr to the bank clerks of Berlin, put forward 
political demands, and all of them based them- 
selves on the Soviet idea. The strikes were in 
fact a far more deadly form of social disintegra- 
tion than the fighting. They end only to begin 
again after an interval for recuperation. The 
Ruhr miners, for example, have worked for barely 
half the period from November to May, and the 
last week of April the output of coal had fallen 
in Germany generally to 1 per cent, of the normal 
quantity. The effect on the railways and on in- 
dustry can be imagined. Capital values are be- 
ing ruined steadily. At every big station one sees 
queues of dilapidated locomotives which cannot be 
repaired. Some of the coal-mines are hopelessly 
flooded. Machinery is everywhere being ruined 
for want of lubricating oil. For years the science 
and energy of this race fought the consequences 
of the blockade. I found myself continually mar- 
veling at the ingenuity which could make dress 
materials, bath towels, and string from woven pa- 
per, and replace the pneumatic tires of bicycles 
and cars with noisy but comfortable substitutes 
of steel springs. To-day one feels that the 
struggle has been abandoned; the tough will has 



122 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

been broken. The motive power of hope has 
failed. 

The problem of to-day, with or without help and 
understanding from the West, is to re-create hope. 
It is partly a physical problem. A doctor would 
prescribe a rest-cure, with abundant and stimulat- 
ing food, for the whole nation. It is not merely 
half-starved : it is in a state of nervous ill-health, 
that varies according to temperament from dull 
apathy to neurotic over-excitement. No one is sur- 
prised to hear of the physical consequences of 
nearly five years ' progressive under-feeding. The 
children are sickly and stunted: tuberculosis 
rages : the old die off at the first touch of disease : 
the birth-rate falls in some towns and in some 
classes to near vanishing point: the death-rate 
rises : the average man and woman in the streets 
is visibly listless and anemic : the sturdiest work- 
man is incapable of his former efforts and his 
habitual endurance. These things can be meas- 
ured and proved by statistics. The more elusive 
nervous consequences of malnutrition are no less 
obvious, when one has seen the'se defeated peoples 
in the mass at public meetings or in street demon- 
strations. The discipline of North Germany, the 
geniality of South Germany are no longer charac- 
teristic. Thinking is active, feverish, and destruc- 
tive. Berlin seems as deeply interested in a novel 
political theory as London is in a painted "flap- 
per" or the Atlantic flight. The whole current of 
political thought is "to the Left," and the party 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 123 

leader dreads only that his followers should de- 
sert him for a less moderate competitor. I found 
myself at first inclined to treat the recklessness 
of this political speculation as a verbal extrava- 
gance. I changed my mind after I had seen un- 
armed crowds in Vienna facing rifle-fire with a 
barely sane contempt of death, and risking their 
lives to pick up a little coal or to cut a fallen 
horse into butcher meat. I changed it even more 
after I had watched the ascendancy over the Ber- 
lin Workers' " Soviet' ' of Communist speakers, 
whose tones and gestures at once betrayed a neu- 
rotic condition. Years of poverty and semi-star- 
vation have sapped the morals of the blockaded 
peoples. An elaborate social structure has fallen 
into decay, like a farm which returns to the wilder- 
ness when cultivation ceases. The once incorrupt- 
ible civil service of Germany, with its tremendous 
pride in the ethics of the official caste, is no longer 
proof against bribes. Theft and even robbery 
have become frequent, as they were not in the old 
days, and one heard of girls who would sell them- 
selves for a cake of soap. We are pleased to talk 
of Huns, but when history tells the whole story of 
the working of this blockade from the Urals to the 
Rhine, in the hospitals that lack drugs, linen, and 
anesthetics, in the garrets where dying children 
call to unemployed fathers, in the streets where 
desperate mobs pillage under the fire of brutalized 
troops, the next generation will ask with probing 
curiosity what devastation it was that Attila 



124 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

wrought to compare with this achievement of ours. 
Even if the blockade were lifted to-morrow, if 
food were poured in, and credits granted to re- 
start industry, I doubt whether German politics 
would then begin to enter a normal path. The 
sounder a people is, and the more its health re- 
covers, the more will it seek to open some door of 
hope. The crime of this treaty is that it kills 
hope. Every one in Germany had hope for an 
end of wars: but there will be no rest, if these 
annexations to Poland are maintained. Every one 
had built on the League of Nations : it is at best a 
disappointing structure, and from it Germany is 
excluded. To unite with Austria would have been 
some compensation for the loss of Alsace and 
Posen, which every one knew to be just : that also 
is excluded. All this, however, is trifling, com- 
pared with the economic ruin that faces Germany. 
To lose every trading center, and footing, and fa- 
cility in China, Africa, Turkey, Eussia; to lose 
the entire mercantile fleet, to be denied reciprocal 
rights in tariffs, transport, foreign residence; to 
see no prospects of obtaining raw materials on 
equal terms — all this means, to say nothing of the 
humiliation, a return to the economic conditions of 
the middle of last century. With no means of re- 
storing her foreign trade, Germany must some- 
how maintain a population which can live only by 
foreign trade. Apart altogether from the indem- 
nity, that prospect means ruin in the most literal 
sense. It means that for some fifteen millions of 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 125 

the population it will be impossible by ex- 
change to purchase the necessary food from 
abroad. 1 

Of the indemnity I will say nothing: it cannot 
under these conditions be paid. One may ruin 
Germany, if one so pleases. One might exact, 
after a couple of years for recuperation, a reason- 
able contribution for reparation. One cannot do 
both. How will the future shape under this 
treaty? Will it, in the first place, be signed? The 
odds are that, sooner or later (probably sooner), 
it will be signed. There lives no single German 
who would sign it, save under the dread of literal 
starvation. I believe that the Democratic Party, 
roused by Theodor Wolff of the Tageblatt, is sin- 
cere in its refusal to sign, and, unless there are 
large modifications, its members will leave the 
Cabinet rather than sign. This party has no 
working-class electors: the middle class can al- 
ways buy some food. The Majority Socialists and 
the Catholic Center are both divided, but both on 
the whole incline to sign in the last resort under 
protest, for their working-class followers (includ- 
ing the Center's Catholic women voters) would 
not pardon leaders who condemned them to star- 
vation. The Independents are almost alone in say- 

i Mr. Hoover has predicted that ten or twelve million Germans 
will be forced to emigrate. Whither? North America is closed. 
The Argentine is legally open, and Russia one day will be open. 
But shall we tolerate a German " penetration " of Russia ? Will 
the ghost of President Monroe allow Latin-America to be 
Germanized. 



126 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

ing openly that there is no alternative to signa- 
ture ; but they are too shrewd to relieve the pres- 
ent Ministry of the responsibility. Some change 
of persons is probable, both in the Cabinet and in 
the delegation at Versailles, before the treaty is 
signed. 1 In any event the moral value of this 
signature will be less than nothing, for it will 
mean only that in the present condition of 
anemia half the nation lacks the heroism to 
starve. The act, whether of signing or not sign- 
ing, will be fatal to the present Coalition. Their 
prestige at present is very low. If they sign, it 
will be lower still. If they should refuse to 
sign, the starving masses would wholly desert 
them. 

I doubt whether as yet any single tendency is 
strong enough to dominate Germany after the 
hour of humiliation, and to hew out a road of hope. 
Parliament is flat, dull, and remote, and its ranks 
poor in notable personalities. There may be an 
attempt to form an all-Socialist Cabinet, but it 
could not secure unity. It must on the one hand 
omit the most compromised " Right " Socialists, 
especially the detested Noske. On the other hand, 

i These forecasts proved correct. The Democrats (Liberals) 
dropped out of the Ministry, and so did Scheidemann, with two 
or three others. The leading personalities are now Erzberger, 
Noske (who will probably ruin his colleagues), and the Foreign 
Minister, Hermann Mtiller, a moderate Majority Socialist, who 
retained his popularity with all sections during these years of 
bitter feud, and is a man of transparent honesty and much good 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 127 

neither the Communist leaders nor even such 
"Left" Independents as Daumig are likely to join 
it, because they believe in a pure Soviet adminis- 
tration. Even if the more moderate Independents 
(Haase, Oskar Cohn, Kautsky, Breitscheid) and 
the "Left" Majority (Wissel, Kaliski, Cohen- 
Reuss) were to form a government without a ma- 
jority, but with the tacit consent of the Assembly, 
it would be wrecked before long by the revolu- 
tionary tactics of the Extreme Left. The Left 
leaders have learned by recent events that armed 
insurrection is doomed to failure, but they intend 
to continue the policy of strikes. The Communist 
leaders whom I saw impressed me as nervous 
wrecks. Behind them is an army of desperate 
men, the war-cripples, the unemployed, the unem- 
ployable. In the general mood of despair the 
future belongs to the most reckless group. No 
one has much to lose, and even for the propertied 
class property has lost its value if trade is out 
of the question and the workers will not work. 
The Versailles plan of exploiting Germany for a 
generation omits all reckoning with human nature. 
As the Nation put it, men are not bees who will 
go on working if all the honey is taken periodic- 
ally from the hive. 

Sane men were absorbed in one problem only 
— how to induce the workers to work again. With- 
out some hope in the future it cannot be solved. 
Expedients for creating hope are many and con- 
tradictory. The old military party dreams, of 



128 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

course, of a revanche in the old style, and Leagues 
of Officers discuss the possibility of an air war, 
and play with schemes of a more or less secret 
militia. Their public as yet is small, and the 
general sense condemns this reversion to the past. 
The next war will not be a shock of Powers, dy- 
nasties, and diplomatic coalitions: it will be an 
economic struggle with the class war raging be- 
neath it. There is much talk of an alliance with 
Soviet Kussia, and some Pan-Germans, notably 
Professor Elzbacher, advised the adoption of Bol- 
shevism en bloc. That seemed a trifle sudden, for 
all Berlin was still covered with ugly official post- 
ers depicting Bolshevism as a vampire. The real 
Communists refused to coquet with this faction. 
A curious "Continental" movement, with Bloch, 
Kaliski, and Cohen-Eeuss as its leaders, has some 
footing among the Left Socialist majority. It be- 
lieves in an understanding with France and Eus- 
sia to break the Anglo-American economic ascend- 
ancy. The idea of any understanding with France 
seems fantastic. The " Continentalists ' ' justify 
their expectation on the ground that France and 
Germany are both crippled by the war : there must 
be a fraternity in suffering: the lame man must 
help the paralytic. They seem to forget that these 
two nations crippled each other : moreover, France 
has this compensation, that her Allies seem con- 
tent to allow her a revival of her ancient military 
ascendancy in Europe. Though there are many 
difficulties in arranging an economic understand- 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 129 

ing with Russia across the barrier of Poland 
(whose railways may not welcome German 
through traffic), this half of the policy is clearly 
sound. None the less, though there are brilliant 
men (notably Julius Kaliski) in this circle, I 
doubt if it is more as yet than a group of literary 
frondeurs. The orthodox Socialist position, to 
which the Independents give the most confident 
expression, is, of course, that this treaty, as cruel 
as the Peace of Brest, will last no longer. They 
foresee an early change of opinion, perhaps a 
revolutionary change, in France and Britain, and 
predict that the International will insist on the re- 
vision of the treaty. That may be the one sane 
hope, but no one who has watched English opinion 
this week will be disposed to expect much in the 
way of action at a very early date. There m^y 
be a disposition to admit Germany to the League 
of Nations after two years. The disturbing ques- 
tion is what will happen during the period of 
waiting. In any event, could a League of Nations, 
tied by its present Constitution, ever force Poland 
to disgorge her unjustifiable acquisitions'? 

I cannot believe myself that this faint hope, fed 
with a few perfunctory resolutions from London 
and Paris, will have life enough in it to induce 
the German worker to desert the leadership of the 
Extremists. The two real forces in Germany 
to-day are the new volunteer army on the one hand 
and the revolutionary workers on the other — the 
machine gun and the strike. Tins new Pretorian 



130 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

Guard, raised by Noske to crush Spartacus, num- 
bers about 450,000 men. A large proportion even 
in the ranks are ex-officers or university students, 
and the inducement to join it is chiefly abundant 
food, good clothes, and high pay. The signature 
of the treaty will require the disbandment of 
three-fourths of this new force, and the relics of 
the old army (about 300,000 men). The immedi- 
ate future might depend on the accident whether 
a civilian Ministry chooses the Corps which are to 
survive, or whether an enterprising Corps chooses 
the Ministry. A powerful caste is about to be 
ruined, and the disbanded men and officers will be 
potentially revolutionary material. That Ger- 
many in its present condition can be policed by 
an army, however efficient, which numbers only 
100,000 men, seems to me improbable. If Noske 
or a successor attempts to do with 100,000 men 
what he has done, none too easily, with 700,000, 
he will assuredly fail. On the other hand, the 
adoption of a conciliatory social policy would 
probably come too late. The popular expedient is 
to attempt a compromise with the Soviet system, 
on something like English Guild Socialist lines — 
a two-chamber Parliament, one House on the 
present territorial plan, and the other on a basis 
of industrial representation. That would be at 
the best an unstable compromise, and the Left 
Socialist Wing would go on fighting for ' ' the real 
thing," the dictatorship of the proletariat. The 
treaty is triple nonsense. It expects Germany to 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 131 

earn vast sums, and to earn them without the 
right and facility to trade abroad. It expects 
some government to impose this servitude on the 
German workers, yet denies to that government 
the army which alone might hold them down in 
outward obedience. It robs fifteen million Ger- 
mans of subsistence, and omits to provide them 
with a field for emigration. 

I am inclined to risk a prediction of the conse- 
quences of enforcing this treaty. They will not 
be interesting or eventful. For months to come 
Germany may be forgotten. She lacks the energy 
or the unity to act, though spasmodic essays, at 
positive action in opposite directions, may be at- 
tempted. The chief consequences will be negative. 
The workers will not work, or in so far as they 
work, it will be fitfully, half-heartedly, like angry, 
weary, and helpless men. So far from resenting 
this attitude, the middle-class employees will 
largely share it. Already the lines of class cleav- 
age between the hand-worker and miserably 
sweated brain-worker have almost disappeared. 
This "ca* canny" mood will affect the employers 
no less than the men. The natural tendency to 
repair machinery and restart trade will be checked 
at every turn by the knowledge that between the 
burden of internal taxation 1 amounting to more 

i The whole burden of internal taxation in Germany for the 
coming financial year (1919-20), excluding the indemnities 
altogether, is according to the new Finance Minister, Herr 
Erzherger, 25 milliard marks. Herr Wassermann, a director of 
the Deutsche Bank, kindly showed me his calculations under- 



132 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

than half the national income, and the load of the 
foreign tribute, all chance of appreciable profits 
has disappeared. Banks will refuse credit, for 
until the first two years are over no one will know 
what Germany's liabilities really are, nor until 
she is admitted to the League will her chance of 
trade be worth estimating. The ruin will go on 
unchecked, and the irresistible conviction will 
grow that the only chance of restarting life lies in 
repudiating debts, or in socializing without com- 
pensation. The Entente, in short, by this treaty, 
is reducing Germany to a despair as deep as 
Russia's. In the long run, the only possible field 
for German energy is Russia, and whether Lenin 
rules or Kolchak, no force can ultimately keep 
the German population from carrying its skill and 
science to the mental desert of the East. In the 
end, the two peoples whom the West has wronged, 
will seek their revanche together. But for a vivid, 
angry, resourceful, positive movement of protest 
and resistance, one need not look to-morrow. 
That in the end would be better for the world, for 
courage may do much to glorify ruin. Lethargy, 
despair, decay, the decline of an elaborate civili- 
zation, the slow lapse into disrepair of a good ma- 
chine, that will be the immediate consequence of 
this treaty that murders hope. The German na- 

taken to estimate the total income of the nation for the past 
year. Including all taxable income, allowing for incomes below 
the level of taxation and adding a margin for concealment and 
evasion, he reached a total national income of 48 milliard marks. 



AN IMPRESSION OF GERMANY 133 

tion will wear itself out in abortive motions of 
unrest. It will flounder : it will sulk : it will decay. 
Injure us it cannot, save by its sickness, but this 
corpse is big enough to poison Europe. 

London, May 20M. 



IX 

THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 

Two sights arrested my attention during a first 
walk in the central streets of Berlin towards the 
end of April. The public buildings in Unter den 
Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse were still covered 
with the pock-marks of rifle- and machine-gun 
fire. The city had gone through the smallpox of 
revolution, and survived with scars. Rather more 
interesting than the bullet-marks was a conspicu- 
ous printed notice which still adorned the Opera 
House, the University, and some of the buildings 
where the Ministers were housed. " Under the 
Protection," it ran, "of the Workers' and Sol- 
diers' Council of Berlin.' ' Germany is a Parlia- 
mentary Republic of the conventional pattern, 
with its President, and its responsible Cabinet of 
Ministers, its Parliament elected by universal suf- 
frage, its States built on a similar pattern, while 
its cities have their orthodox elected Municipal 
Councils. It had still its small and highly efficient 
army, the pick of the youth of the old war-ma- 
chine, and at the doors of these very buildings the 
sentries paced up and down, sturdy young men in 
smart "field-gray" uniforms with shapely steel 
helmets on their heads and hand-grenades in their 

134 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 135 

belts. Yet in spite of Ministers and Parliaments 
and well-paid volunteer sentries, it was still worth 
while to remind any insurgent warriors who might 
have been tempted to assail these buildings that 
they were under the protection of the Berlin 
Workers' Council. These Councils, constructed 
on the plan of the Russian Soviets, have as yet 
no assured place in the Draft Constitution. They 
are simply committees elected by the workmen of 
Berlin, and yet, as these notices suggested, they 
have some moral power which a legal government, 
backed as the Ebert-Scheidemann regime was, by 
horse and foot, by guns and grenades, did not dis- 
dain to call to its aid. 

Hard by the first of these notices which caught 
my eye was a placard announcing a lecture. It 
was a striking bill, and I saw it again and again 
as I wandered about Berlin. Like the " protec- 
tion' ' notice, it became for me a symbol of the con- 
temporary Germany. It announced that at one of 
an important series of meetings organized by the 
Democratic Party (i.e. the middle-class Liberals), 
a well-known Professor would lecture on the 
theme "Why has Weimar caused disillusion- 
ment?" The choice of the subject and the word- 
ing of the title were significant. Weimar, where 
the National Assembly meets, is, of course, the 
symbol for democracy of the conventional West- 
ern Parliamentary type. The pathos of this lec- 
ture lay in the fact that for three generations the 
political groups of which the Democratic Party is 



136 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the heir, have preached representative Democracy 
as the one thing needful. Others, the Socialists, 
for example, have preached it, as a necessary in- 
gredient in something else, or a necessary step- 
ping-stone to a happier shore, but for the Demo- 
crats democracy was enough. One may reproach 
them with infidelities and weaknesses, lapses into 
Imperialism, and occasionally, though rarely, with 
a passing sycophantic moment towards royalty, 
but they and their forefathers, from 1848 down- 
wards, had certainly stood for Parliamentary gov- 
ernment, and for most of them England had been 
the model. The Eevolution of November had ful- 
filled their wildest dreams. It had brought not 
merely democracy but republican democracy. No 
opposition from the Eight dared any longer raise 
its head, and it only remained to discuss the de- 
tails, and to work out the plan of the most en- 
lightened constitution in Europe. For a genera- 
tion most of these men had dreamed, not indeed 
of this complete fulfilment of their hopes, but of 
some slow and distant approach to it. A year 
ago even the reform of the Prussian franchise had 
seemed a slightly precarious hope, and now every- 
thing had come at once — responsible govermnent, 
women's suffrage, proportional representation, 
the democratization of Prussia, and the disappear- 
ance not merely of the Hohenzollerns but of the 
whole brood of princely families. A working 
saddler was President of the German Eeich and 
a former compositor dictated policy in Bismarck's 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 137 

old Chaneelry. The Democrats, elderly or middle- 
aged gentlemen of a slow digestion, would have 
liked to sit down to a lengthy process of rumina- 
tion, to survey their realized ideal and find it good. 
They had to recognize, however, that contempo- 
rary Germany took only the faintest interest in 
this dream of constitutional perfection. The 
masses were thinking of anything and everything 
else, and already a formidable and growing Left 
Wing talked as though the perfect model of Parlia- 
mentary democracy were a thing intellectually as 
obsolete as the Junker ascendancy, and as remote 
from the real life of the people as the monarchy 
itself. Of Weimar and the Assembly few troubled 
even to talk, and those few, for the most part, 
with impatience. All over Germany the Left was 
setting up ephemeral Soviet Governments, and 
when Comrade Noske's "Free Corps' ' had upset 
them, with a maximum of bloodshed, it wanted 
only a fresh epidemic of strikes to prove that 
nothing in reality was settled. Instead of sitting 
down to celebrate the triumph of Parliamentary 
democracy, the unhappy Democrats were reduced 
to offering apologies for Weimar. They were 
frank enough to recognize that Germany had lost 
an illusion. 

For the contempt in which Weimar was rather 
generally held there were some accidental and 
temporary reasons. It was generally said of 
William II that he had destroyed the monarchy 
for ever by his inglorious flight. The removal of 



138 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the National Assembly from its natural seat in the 
Capital to the provincial calm of Weimar had a 
like effect. It was an act of cowardice, a retreat 
before the passionately discontented masses of 
Berlin. In the second place, Weimar had to as- 
sume responsibility for the government of Ger- 
many in an hour of universal malaise. It was 
free, indeed, of responsibility for the catastrophic 
defeat for which Kaiserdom, the Junkers, and 
the Pan-Germans bore the blame. The real cause 
of the social misery, the hunger, the cold, the un- 
employment of the terrible winter that followed 
the armistice, was the continued Allied Blockade, 
maintained with completer rigidity than ever, in 
the matter of food, up till the month of April, 
while as regards raw materials it was never for 
a moment relaxed. No one could fairly blame 
Weimar for the blockade — though, to be sure, I 
have heard Left- Wing Socialists argue (absurdly, 
in my opinion) that the whole attitude of the 
Allies would have been gentler, if persons less 
compromised than Scheidemann and his col- 
leagues had sat at the council-table. Certainly 
Weimar was blamed for the inadequacy of its 
remedial measures, and for the savagery with 
which the Spartacus revolt was suppressed. Few 
peoples are just to their governments at such 
times, and Weimar became associated with hunger, 
revolt, and distress. The worst of all was that 
the Assembly took its functions as a constituent 
body with enormous seriousness. It set to work 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 139 

at once, and worked with German thoroughness at 
the task of elaborating the Constitution. As luck 
would have it, what Germany in this dark winter 
needed was not the ideal democratic Constitution, 
but some interim solutions of social problems 
which would give confidence to the workers and 
ease the difficult task of persuading them to work 
and think constructively. Those who had voted 
for the Socialist lists saw with satisfaction a So- 
cialist President and a Socialist Premier at the 
head of the State, but nothing was socialized, not 
even the coal-mines. They had expected some im- 
mediate result from their votes, but nothing hap- 
pened that touched their daily lives. In some 
degree the very perfection of the democratic ma- 
chine was to blame. The Proportional system had 
given to every group its exact share of representa- 
tion but it returned no one party in numbers suf- 
ficient to form a homogeneous administration. 
Under a simple majority vote with single-member 
constituencies the Parties of the Eight instead of 
securing 15 per cent, of the representation would 
probably have disappeared and the two Socialist 
parties would have had numbers enough (if they 
could have composed their feud) to form a purely 
Socialist Government with an adequate majority. 
Finally, Weimar was a disappointment, because 
the German people, when it made its revolution, 
expected that a democratic Germany would re- 
ceive better treatment from the Allies than the old 
< ' autocracy ' ' would have done. That had been the 



140 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

burden of speeches in which Mr. Wilson and Mr. 
Lloyd George had held out this hope in plainer 
words than statesmen often use. As the months 
went by, that expectation vanished, and Germans 
understood that their democratic Eepublic was to 
be a pariah and a helot in Europe. As the news 
of one scheme after another, of annexation and 
economic enslavements, reached them from Paris, 
the task of making a Constitution for a vanishing 
fatherland began to look vainer than ever. I 
happened to be talking to Professor Preuss, the 
Minister charged with drafting the Constitution, 
when the first summary of the Peace Terms ar- 
rived. "We had nearly finished our building 
plan," was his comment, "but you are destroying 
our site.' , 

Enough of faith and optimism was left even in 
this defeated and despondent nation to seek out an 
alternative to the older democratic form which had 
disappointed it. An ever-widening circle saw in 
the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, based on the 
Kussian Soviet model, the future structure of rep- 
resentation in Germany. The reasons which have 
made this tendency a stream too strong to be re- 
sisted are as various as the reasons which dis- 
credited Weimar. The Extreme Left, of course, 
saw in these Councils the apt instruments of the 
coming social revolution. Without that motive it 
is doubtful whether they would ever have been 
created. With some disguises the Left built them 
up for this purpose, and whenever the Eevolution 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 141 

triumphed, whether in reckless Munich or soher 
Hanover, the Councils were ready to direct it 
The curious fact was that although this intention 
was barely disguised by the Left, the more mod- 
erate parties were obliged to fall into step. The 
Majority Socialists, or rather the inner directing 
ring of their powerful organization, were never 
really friendly to the Council idea. They are an 
essentially conservative force, like all disciplined 
political machines. They have a long past behind 
them, and their instinctive attitude towards every 
new idea is one of jealousy and hostility. In poli- 
tics they believe in the old Parliamentary forms 
and could not advance beyond the ideal for which 
they had battled for a generation. In industry, 
they believed in the Trade Unions as the organs 
ot class struggle, and the Trade Union officials 
who are as influential among them as they are in 
the British Labor Party, regarded the Councils as 
dangerous rivals to their own Unions. None the 
less, the Majority Socialists were carried by the 
public opinion of the working-class far beyond 
their own wishes in a recognition of the Councils 
and busied themselves, not with open opposition, 
hut with the invention of compromises which 
would give the Councils some place in the working- 
class movement compatible with the survival of 
Parliament and the Trade Unions. More interest- 
ing still was the attitude of the "black-coated" 
workmen, especially the clerks, who were at first 
considered as "bourgeois," and were left outside 



142 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

these class organizations. One of the most start- 
ling results of the war and the blockade in Central 
Europe is that the wall of partition between the 
manual worker and the brain-worker has worn 
very thin. The clerk, the teacher, the civil serv- 
ant, and the small professional man have been 
much less successful than the well-organized 
Trade Unionists in raising their nominal earnings, 
and as the value of money fell, they have often 
sunk to a level of poverty much below that of the 
artisan. The struggle to preserve appearances 
and to seem to be members of the master-class is 
maintained with much less than the old obstinacy. 
More and more these salaried employees have 
learned to think of themselves as proletarians. 
The Berlin clerk to-day votes for the Majority 
Socialists, or if he clings to a bourgeois party, his 
choice is the Democrats. So it happened that the 
bank clerks of Berlin made an obstinate strike 
(and won it) not merely for an increase of salary, 
but for the right to form their Council like other 
workmen, and to send their delegates to the Berlin 
Soviet. There are in that big and stormy body, 
by no means tolerant to minorities, a little group 
of "Democratic" (or as we should say "Liberal") 
representatives, who take their full part in debate 
with the Socialists, and prove their loyalty to the 
institution by their good humor in facing a noisy 
and far from sympathetic audience. While I was 
in Berlin, continual declarations of adhesion to 
some form of the Council idea were appearing in 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 143 

the Press. One came from the veteran Liberal 
economist Professor Brentano, and another in the 
form of a lengthy, reasoned resolution was passed 
by the organization which represents the employ- 
ers of Berlin. They obviously believed that the 
way out of revolutionary chaos lay in the friendly 
recognition of these Councils by the State, and 
the attribution to them of a real but limited sphere 
of influence. 

The Left had its own clear and decided idea of 
the function and future of the Councils. It in- 
tended that they should remain a class organiza- 
tion in the broad meaning of that word. Every 
genuine worker, including the salaried employee 
and the professional man, should have a vote for 
them, but no employer, no rentier, none who lived 
by the toil of others. I heard a debate on the 
draft of a new formal Constitution in the Berlin 
Soviet during May. Some of the marginal cases 
were rather curious. The Left was quite ready, 
for example, to enfranchise doctors in ordinary 
practice, but it wanted to exclude doctors who 
made a living by keeping sanatoria in which they 
"exploit" the labor of junior doctors and nurses. 
The Right wished to include even the employer if 
he were himself active as manager and organizer ; 
but in the Berlin Soviet, as it is to-day, the Left 
is dominant. The real driving forces of the move- 
ment, the extremer "Independents" like Daumig 
and Richard Miiller, and, of course, the Commun- 
ists, regarded Parliamentary institutions as obso- 



144 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

lescent. They meant sooner or later to make Ger- 
many a "Rate-Kepublik"; in other words, to sup- 
press the rival institutions, and to make the Kate 
(Councils) the sole legislative and executive au- 
thorities. Any compromise they regarded as 
purely transitional. 

For the moment the idea of compromise has won. 
The one permanent result of the March general 
strike was that the Government promised to give 
the Workers ' Councils a definite place in the Ger- 
man Constitution. As yet, the scheme agreed 
upon between the Scheidemann Cabinet and a dele- 
gation from the Berlin Soviet (in which at that 
time the Majority Socialists were leading) exists 
only in outline. It is a promise that the Consti- 
tution shall recognize, or set up (1) Works' Com- 
mittees representing all workers and employees in 
every factory, mine, etc.; (2) Industrial Councils 
in every trade, of the "Whitley' ' type, to regu- 
late the general conditions of production, repre- 
senting both employers and workers; (3) Cham- 
bers of Work, representing employers, the profes- 
sions, and the workers of all trades in definite ter- 
ritorial districts; and (4) a Chamber of Work for 
the whole German Eealm, with a right of sugges- 
tion and consultation on all industrial and social- 
political legislation. 

This " compromise' ' was a clever stroke on the 
part of the non-revolutionary majority, for in a 
subtle way it turns the weapon of the Left against 
itself. The intention is that the Chamber of Work, 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 145 

and the local analogous bodies, shall represent 
employers and employed on a basis of parity. 
Thus, the pure class organization, the Workers' 
Council, is transformed into a body based on the 
equal rights of capital and labor. No one, so far 
as I know, has suggested the introduction of any 
disinterested or balancing element. I had an op- 
portunity of discussing the scheme with Herr 
Julius Kaliski, the leader of the anti-official Op- 
position within the Majority Socialist Party, and 
one of the ablest thinkers in the Socialist move- 
ment. He regards the Government's offer merely 
as a first step. In his view, the Chamber of Work 
is destined to be a more important body in the 
Constitution than the Eeichstag itself. He claims 
for it parallel legislative powers, even outside the 
field of industrial and social legislation. How, as 
he justly asks, can one divorce industrial policy 
from the foreign policy of the State, in a world 
where foreign policy turns continually on the 
struggle for markets and raw materials'? He 
would provide for conflicts between the two 
Chambers by giving the Eeichstag the right which 
the British Commons have against the Lords, to 
carry a Bill which it had passed three times, in 
spite of the veto of the Chamber of Work. When 
I suggested that a Chamber composed in equal 
parts of Workers and Employers would be an un- 
manageable body with no internal cohesion, and no 
single driving force, and no motive which could 
give unity of direction, he answered that the 



146 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

Chamber of Work would represent the community 
as producer, and that the interests of production 
itself would give it unity. He assumed, in fact, 
that the desire to serve the community by produc- 
ing in the best possible way is ultimately the dom- 
inant motive alike with employers and employed. 

There is in this German compromise between 
the old forms of democracy with their basis in 
territorial representation and the new form with 
its basis in industry, a close parallel to the solu- 
tion propounded, even before the war, by our 
British Guild Socialists. The Germans have, how- 
ever, reached their compromise mechanically. 
They find the State and the old form of democracy 
in existence, and they make terms with it, but 
trouble themselves very little to assign it a suit- 
abe function. The Guild Socialist, on the other 
hand, does not merely tolerate or accept the i ' dem- 
ocratic' J Parliament: he regards it as the neces- 
sary representation of citizens regarded as con- 
sumers. His structure is no mere compromise: 
it is a recognition of the fact .that the same person 
will act and vote somewhat differently, according 
as he is organized as a consumer or producer. 
The German " Councils " movement, on the other 
hand, is thinking only of the worker as producer. 

This interesting phase of social evolution in 
Germany was interrupted for a moment by the 
crisis over the Terms of Peace. The next few 
months will show whether it can be directed into 
the channels of a constitutional development. For 



THE SOVIET IDEA IN GERMANY 147 

my part I am inclined to think that the class cleav- 
age, sharpened intolerably by the miseries of war 
and the blockade, is too acute to admit of such 
compromises as the Government or even Herr 
Kaliski propose. The Independents and the Com- 
munists scoff at the idea of any Chamber of Work 
in which the employing class has equal repre- 
sentation with the workers. They are fanatically 
attached to the Council idea, not merely because 
it is a more supple and natural form of repre- 
sentation than the old territorial basis, but above 
all because it represents the worker to the exclu- 
sion of the capitalist. The compromise is not yet 
accepted, and the power of the Left is growing. 
The tactical value of the Workers' Council for 
the Left is, firstly, that it brings together all the 
workers, no longer sundered in crafts and divided 
in Trade Unions, as a single class with a solid 
interest against capital as a whole, and secondly 
that it can wield the weapon of the political strike. 
At bottom, it is, I believe, the acuteness of this 
class cleavage in Germany which explains the de- 
cay of Parliament. Parliament is neither a Work- 
ers ' nor an Employers' Council, but a confused 
attempt to reflect the unity of a nation, where, in 
fact, unity no longer exists. 

The compromise might, I think, stand a chance 
of success if at the start some of the chief in- 
dustries were already nationalized. If, for ex- 
ample, the mines and the big metal concerns were 
represented among the employers on the Council, 



148 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

not by profit-making companies, but by the demo- 
cratic State as owner, then the two halves of the 
Chamber of Work would no longer reflect an un- 
bridgable class cleavage. Under these conditions 
the Chamber of Work would tend to be a body 
specially charged with the duty of preparing the 
progressive socialization of industry and gradu- 
ating the stages of public control over production. 
Evolution in the present condition of Germany 
can hope to cope with revolution only if it moves 
rapidly and visibly. The pace since November has 
been too slow, primarily because the makers of 
the Eepublic failed to realize that democracy is 
no longer for any living society an end in itself. 



THE NEW MILITARISM 

As I entered Germany through Bavaria, the Gov- 
ernment troops, Noske 's "Free Corps," were 
massing for the attack on Munich. One saw them 
at every station, vigorous young men in the twen- 
ties, many of them ex-officers. They had new uni- 
forms. They looked clean and well fed. They 
bustled about the stations with a brisk air among 
the listless crowds. They drank wine in the buf- 
fets, and in the streets they walked about with 
girls. They seemed to dominate Germany with 
their steel helmets and their stick-grenades ready 
at their belts. I had arrived in time to witness 
the triumph of law and order. Noske with his 
450,000 Volunteers was supreme. Work, to be 
sure, went no better for their victory. The un- 
employed still elected Communists to the Work- 
ers' Councils. After the Euhr, the Silesian coal- 
pits struck. But Noske added victory to victory, 
and from Munich in due course came the news that 
the last stronghold of Spartacus had fallen. 

I spent an evening some days later in a hospit- 
able " Independent ' ' Socialist house in Berlin. 
Among the guests were a banker, a count, and a 
certain Baron S. It was not exactly the company 

149 



150 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

that one expected to meet in a Marxist salon. Of 
the three, Baron S. interested me particularly. 
He was once connected with Krnpps. His fame 
as a successful agent of German propaganda used 
to reach us in telegrams from Athens while King 
Constantine still reigned. To-day he occupies a 
post at the seat of power. He is attached in a 
political capacity to the Free Corps — Noske 's anti- 
revolutionary guard. To me he seemed a man of 
unusual intelligence and decision. At the moment 
of Noske 's apparent triumph, I was curious to 
hear how politics looked from the windows of the 
"Eden Hotel" — for Baron S. had his office in the 
headquarters of the Corps which murdered Lieb- 
knecht and Eosa Luxemburg. The replies to my 
first questions were more than startling. The 
Corps knew that they had failed. They had 
started with all manner of boyish and soldierly 
illusions about the efficacy of force, but already 
they were weary of the unending work. They 
rushed to one great town, only to find that a gen- 
eral strike had broken out. in another. So soon 
as one coalfield was "pacified,' ' another "downed 
tools.' ' With machine guns and hand grenades 
one can destroy a revolutionary Government, but 
one cannot force the workers to work. The end 
of it all will be Bolshevism, declared Baron S. 
vehemently; there is only one possible alternative. 
Here I invite the reader to pause, and recollect 
the speaker's antecedents. The alternative, if you 
please, was an all-Socialist Government. Noske 



THE NEW MILITARISM 151 

and Scheidemann must go. They were sham So- 
cialists. The middle-class Ministers must all go. 
The workers would trust only a Government of 
Socialists, and work they will not, until they trust 
the Government. It must embody the Soviets in 
the Constitution, as a Second Chamber. It must 
instantly nationalize the mines and the big metal 
industries. There, perhaps, it might stop short. 
The workers would believe an all-Socialist Gov- 
ernment, if it said that more for the moment was 
inexpedient. They would not believe a mixed Co- 
alition which refused to nationalize; in that case 
they drew the conclusion that Erzberger and 
Dernburg had paralyzed their Socialist colleagues. 
"But," I asked in amazement, "would the Free 
Corps allow their creator Noske to be deposed; 
would they tolerate an all-Socialist Government V 
The answer came promptly. "The leaders all 
agree : they accept my plan. ' ' So, then, the pillars 
of order no longer trust their own stability. They 
see the necessity at least of a moderate advance 
into Socialism, and even of a partial adoption of 
the Soviet system — they would cure Bolshevism 
by homoeopathy. The banker was of the same 
opinion. 

The sequel proves that Baron S. was probably 
too sanguine in his estimate of the intelligence 
of the leaders of the Free Corps. The fact was, I 
think, that the Corps were sharply divided by a 
feud which was at bottom rather personal and 
professional than political. Some weeks later, 



152 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

at the Congress of the Majority Socialists, Noske 
accused the Independents of tampering with the 
loyalty of his Corps, and endeavoring to arrange 
a coup d'etat. Nothing actually happened, either 
because the Independent leaders were too prudent 
to strike before the Treaty of Peace was signed, 
or because their wiser heads shrank from such 
questionable allies, perhaps because the Corps 
were not really in the salutary state of mind of 
the able and sympathetic Baron S., or else be- 
cause Noske had offered them better terms. 

This accidental glimpse of the under-world of 
intrigue in Berlin set me thinking. On this oc- 
casion the Free Corps had not in fact made a coup 
d'etat, but if they had been so minded, what was 
there to stop them? That is not a question which 
one asks about Germany or any other civilized 
State in normal times. The officers of the army 
are usually men more or less satisfied with their 
professional careers and with their social relaxa- 
tions and ambitions. If in a monarchical State 
they are discontented, their loyalty to the sover- 
eign is usually a sufficient r restraint. One does 
not inquire what would happen if they should 
abuse their monopoly of force, because (in Eng- 
land, for example) the motive which might induce 
them to abuse it is absent. They are ordinary 
members of the governing class, and though they 
commonly belong to its more Conservative Right 
Wing, and are critical of any " advanced " tenden- 
cies which find expression in legislation, there is 



THE NEW MILITARISM 153 

rarely any challenge to the interests of their class 
so sharp as to drive them from grumbling to ac- 
tion. In a country which has conscription, the 
risk of an anti-democratic coup d'etat is negli- 
gible and I can recall no instance of it. The mili- 
tary revolutions which succeeded in Turkey, in 
Portugal, and to a limited extent in Greece, when 
M. Venizelos was first summoned from Crete to 
guide the work of reform, were all of them in their 
origins professedly democratic and anti-dynastic 
movements, and they succeeded only because an 
advanced group of officers was able to enlist the 
sympathy of the men. There are other cases (the 
Boulanger adventure, for example), in which a 
reactionary movement led by generals, who came 
near to testing their power, must obviously have 
failed, because the men on the whole felt with the 
mass of the civilian nation. In the first revolu- 
tions in Russia and Germany, which stopped short 
with the overthrow of the monarchy, the decisive 
factor in both cases was that the conscript soldiers 
or sailors garrisoned in the capital or within easy 
reach of it broke away from their officers and 
actively supported the Republican movement. In 
times of peace it was usually, though not always, 
the case that the conscripts of the " active' ' army 
would fire on riotous strikers at an order from 
their officers. They were, however, very young 
men easily intimidated and influenced : experience 
seems to show that during war, when the bulk of 
the army is composed of reservists of maturer 



154 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

years, there are limits beyond which discipline 
does not avail. 

It is not, I think, a rash assumption, that in 
onr day, given the hold of Socialism upon the 
working class in most Continental countries, the 
officer class could not use the mass of their con- 
script men to upset a Kepublican Government or 
to destroy a Socialist or semi-Socialist or Eadical 
Ministry in the interests of an anti-democratic re- 
action. Even if the Guards, or some other part 
of the active army of young conscripts, were to 
be misled or coerced or bribed into supporting a 
reactionary coup d'etat, there would still be be- 
hind the democratic movement the mass of the 
trained reservists in civil life, who might be called 
up on the popular side, if a nucleus of organiza- 
tion were left intact to conduct a civil war. On 
the whole, universal military service seems to a 
limited extent a safeguard for democracy, or at 
least for its outer forms. That, of course, has 
always been the opinion of Continental Socialists, 
who have always wished to retain compulsory ser- 
vice, though with a very brief period of training 
and with many reforms in the system of discipline 
and command such as Jaures has sketched in 
L'Arrnee Nouvelle. 

In the Germany of to-day one may study, 
though in somewhat bewildering complexity, con- 
ditions which strip society to the foundation, and 
reveal at its base this factor of physical force, 
which we in England habitually ignore in our 



THE NEW MILITARISM 155 

thinking, because it is more comfortable to ignore 
it. The structure of power is so unstable in its 
poise that one hardly knows which of many shocks 
to its balance is the most likely to upset it. Per- 
haps a fatalist would be right who reckoned that 
so many forces tugging in various directions may, 
after all, and in the end neutralize each other. In 
the first place one has to consider the professional 
interests of this mercenary army. It is composed 
of young men to whom high pay and plenty of 
good food were an attraction ; they must have be- 
longed to the minority which in all countries really 
enjoys continual fighting, is not revolted by bru- 
tality, and has no sentimental objection whatever 
to shooting working men. A high proportion of 
them are ex-officers, or students, and the rest 
seemed to be young boys, mostly from the country. 
What will happen, when this force of about 450,000 
is reduced, in accordance with the Treaty, first to 
200,000 and then (by next March) to 100,000 men? 
Will they allow themselves to be disbanded, or will 
they be content to exact subsidies and similar com- 
pensations ! Again their discipline will be tested 
severely when the Allies present for surrender 
their list of commanders by land and sea, some 
of them probably popular and successful leaders 
to whom every mess-table looks up. Will the Free 
Corps assist in arresting and guarding these ac- 
cused commanders and in handing them over to be 
tried by enemy courts-martial? Will they even 
sit quiet while this unpopular operation is carried 



156 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

out by the civil police? To any one who has 
watched the failure of the authorities to punish 
those convicted of atrocities in suppressing Spar- 
tacus that will seem questionable. Again, if the 
Government, partly from necessity and partly 
from electioneering motives, proceeds to measures 
which the propertied class will regard as "the 
end of all things' ' — a drastic levy on capital, the 
nationalization of certain industries and the sub- 
division of the Junker estates — will the officers of 
the Corps remain passive if the Conservative 
leaders should think that the time is ripe to at- 
tempt a reactionary coup in defense of property? 
These Corps cannot have the mentality of a con- 
script army. The officers may number one in 
twenty-five of the whole force (that is a provision 
of the Treaty), and the ranks are largely com- 
posed of middle-class men. The tension of inter- 
ests is so terrific in Germany to-day, and the dif- 
ficulty of paying both debts and indemnities will 
be so great, that no Government can avoid on- 
slaughts on property which will be leveling in 
their effect. They will be doubly unpopular be- 
cause they are imposed by foreign Powers, and 
will benefit foreign Powers. The temptation to 
resist will be strong, and if the propertied class 
should appeal successfully to the Pretorian Guard, 
there is no internal force which could resist it in 
open warfare. At the best it might perhaps be 
wearied out in a long guerrilla struggle, for its 
numbers on the 100,000 basis (if the Allies really 



THE NEW MILITARISM 157 

insist upon that) are not adequate to maintain 
order over a territory so large as Germany. 

If it came to a struggle, however, we are thrown 
on the other horn of the dilemma of force. There 
is, thanks to the Treaty, no regular reserve of 
force, no militia or civic guard, to which a demo- 
cratic Government could appeal if the professional 
army rose against it. The opposition would come 
in the form of mass risings, guerrilla attacks, and 
above all strikes, from the revolutionary forces. 
The struggle would necessarily end in the victory 
of one of the extremes. Long before it were de- 
cided, however, the Entente would presumably in- 
tervene, either by a forward march from the 
Rhine or by the re-imposition of the blockade. No 
pedantry of any dilatory legal procedure laid 
down in the League of Nations Covenant would 
be likely to stand in the way. The Council of the 
League can drive a " coach and four" through 
that Covenant any day, by the simple expedient of 
refusing to ' ' recognize ' ' the German Government, 
whether reactionary or revolutionary, against 
which it proposed to intervene. Thus we are con- 
fronted with another aspect of the haunting prob- 
lem of force. Any revolutionary movement in 
Germany or Austria which comes to power, even 
if it is in a sense a defensive movement acting 
against a lawless militarism, will have to satisfy 
the workers by creating a Soviet form of govern- 
ment. I happen to know, on first-hand authority, 
that an official warning was given this spring by 



158 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the British to the Austrian Government, that 
while socialistic legislation would be tolerated, the 
adoption of a Soviet Constitution would be the 
signal for instant intervention. 

It seems to me that in this attempt to impose a 
middle course on the German States, while at the 
same time forbidding them to build security upon 
a citizen militia, we expose them defenseless to 
the two extremes. There is force available for a 
reactionary policy, the force of the long-term pro- 
fessional army, with its reactionary officer caste. 
There is also force, at least potential force, avail- 
able in the form of the turbulent revolutionary 
strike, which may be used to render the control 
of the Pretorian Guard over the seat and organs 
of government precarious and useless. One hun- 
dred thousand mercenaries may terrorize Berlin 
and some of the federal capitals, but they can 
hardly at the same time control the entire rail- 
way system, the mines, and the scattered indus- 
trial regions. The difficulty might have been 
evaded if in the first days of the Eevolution the 
Ebert-Scheidemann Government had done what 
Doctors Eenner and Bauer so cleverly did in 
Vienna. The Austrians made a militia from re- 
liable Socialist material, and it has stood by them 
loyally through all the trials of the blockade. 
Whether it can be converted into a long-service 
professional army in accordance with the Treaty 
is, however, very doubtful. The German Govern- 
ment was confronted with an appallingly difficult 



THE NEW MILITARISM 159 

problem. It had to combat a violent Spartacist 
movement, subsidized with Russian money, fairly 
well supplied with arms, and able to command the 
services of some trained bodies of revolutionary 
troops, especially the men from the fleet. Only a 
very skilful Government could have dealt with this 
reckless armed revolt without creating a counter- 
revolutionary force, which is certain sooner or 
later to embarrass it, if not overthrow it. It is 
easy to blame Scheidemann and Noske for calling 
in the new militarism of the mercenary fighting 
caste, but it was Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg 
(for all the honor that we pay their martyred 
memory) who first appealed to force, and sharp- 
ened the class war into an armed conflict. 

Every social doctrine has its own appropriate 
solution of the problem of force. It is natural 
for capitalism to create a professional army. It 
is natural for Communism to rely on the prole- 
tarian Red Guard. What we in England do not 
sufficiently realize is that any process of evolu- 
tionary Socialism, which means to retain the 
typical democratic Parliamentary forms, will be 
insecure in its advance unless it has in reserve a 
militia which includes the whole body of citizens, 
or to be more precise, the men. We are apt to 
say that we need no force : we shall advance only 
as we have the opinion of the majority with us. 
But what shall we do if our opponents appeal to 
force 1 Sooner or later there will come a moment 
when a propertied minority, if its privileges are 



160 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

sufficiently threatened, will appeal to force against 
us and will not scruple itself to defy Parliamen- 
tary forms. What then shall we do if it has behind 
it a docile professional force armed with all the 
modern engines of aircraft, tanks, and gas? How 
much would constitutional right avail us, massed 
though we might be in our majorities, against a 
squadron of aeroplanes manned by officers and 
flying low, with their machine guns and their 
bombs? 

In nothing has the League of Nations as it exists 
to-day shown itself so consciously a capitalist cre- 
ation as in its decision to make the long-term 
mercenary army the custodian of the force that 
survives in the world. We are no nearer to the 
end of militarism. What has happened is that 
the older militarism, which was on the whole na- 
tionalist in its scope and aim, is being transformed 
into a new institution which rests definitely upon 
class. We are returning to the age of " chivalry' ' 
when arms were the monopoly of the caste. 



XI 

A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 

The Treaty of Versailles is a monument on which 
is written in legible characters the epitaph of the 
Liberal age in Europe. That age had spent its 
vitality long before the war broke over us. We 
had all prepared the struggle, Allies and enemies 
alike, by a generation of Imperialism. Amid the 
emotional exaltation of the conflict, it seemed for 
a moment that the liberal mind, evolving an elabo- 
rate and constructive idealogy to justify to itself 
the moral and physical horrors of the hatred, the 
slaughter, and the starvation, was preparing for 
a supreme effort to realize itself. In Mr. Wilson's 
speeches it found a lofty and eloquent expression. 
The event has proved that the realistic tendencies 
that guided us in the pre-war period, and laid in 
the Secret Treaties the foundations of this peace, 
were stronger than this improvised idealism, 
which had served its end by keeping the peoples 
in their ranks until victory was won. The per- 
sonal frailties of statesmen are no adequate ex- 
planation of a moral catastrophe so complete. It 
is the mind of the ruling class in the Allied na- 
tions which has written itself into this peace, and 

161 



162 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

made of the Treaty itself an accurate mirror of 
capitalist Imperialism. 

The European settlement reflects that old-world 
"policy of alliances" which M. Clemenceau pro- 
claimed, with perfect frankness, as the antithesis 
to the League of Nations. It is true that the mo- 
tive of the French scheme of reconstruction is a 
passion for safety, and a dread of the formidable 
and prolific German race. The dread is intelli- 
gible, when one calls to mind a vision of the dev- 
astated area of the Somme. France has sought 
safety, however, in a triple panoply of precau- 
tions, which have made her for the moment the 
armed mistress of Europe. She secures herself, 
first of all, by reducing the German army to a 
police force of 100,000 men, without reserves, staff, 
or heavy armaments. She retains, at the same 
time, her own conscript army, unfettered, un- 
limited, and in numbers, as in gallantry and skill, 
immeasurably the most redoubtable armed force 
upon the Continent. Even when it stands alone 
it is, relatively to other Continental forces, im- 
mensely more preponderant than was the German 
military machine at the height of its power. Sec- 
ondly, France has sought reinsurance in a Treaty 
of Alliance which makes Britain and America her 
partners in the defense of her Eastern Frontier. 
Mr. Wilson has forgotten his principle, that 
" there can be no league or alliance or special 
covenants or understanding within the general 
and common family of the League of Nations.' ' 



A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 163 

In so doing, he has created an armed group within 
the League, which will inevitably form the habit 
of acting jointly in the daily intercourse of States 
against its other members, while by giving to 
France this especial guarantee against aggression 
he has weakened the force of the general pledge 
which should protect all its loyal associates. De- 
fensive indeed this Treaty is : so were all the al- 
liances that ranged the peoples in readiness for 
this war. It will work psychologically as alliances 
have always worked. It will give to France an 
assurance of absolute safety in every contingency 
that may arise, and so absolve her from the neces- 
sity of observing prudence and moderation in the 
exercise of her military ascendancy. 

With unflinching concentration and no little 
skill France has contrived to arrange the terri- 
torial settlement of Europe to fit her general de- 
sign. The German race has been subjected not 
merely to disarmament, but to a partial process of 
dismemberment, which may not yet be complete. 
The military occupation of the Left Bank of the 
Rhine is limited, indeed, to fifteen years, but the 
resources of intrigue and intimidation are already 
at work to foster the creation there of a semi-inde- 
pendent buffer State. In the Saar coalfield the 
French State will be for half a generation the sole 
employer, and with the unlimited right to intro- 
duce foreign immigrant workmen, it may modify 
the mind and composition of the present popula- 
tion, before the moment for a plebiscite arrives. 



164 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

Austria-Hungary has been "Balkanized,-' but in 
the creation of this network of little States, too 
small, too landlocked, too little homogeneous to 
be capable of a real independence, France has pur- 
sued a definite military plan. Poland, Tchecho- 
Slovakia, Roumania, and the enlarged Serbian 
Kingdom become her military satellites. All of 
them have been aggrandized in defiance of nation- 
ality at the expense of Germans (or in the case of 
the two latter), of Magyars or Bulgarians, and 
thus a double end has been served. The military 
strength of the dreaded race is reduced, and at 
the same time the little State, endowed with a per- 
ennial source of conflict with the main body of the 
German race, is obliged to lean for protection 
upon France. A small State ceases to be inde- 
pendent when it has wronged a neighbor : it must 
thereafter subordinate itself to a protector. Po- 
land, as the suzerain of Danzig, and the sovereign 
of from two to three million German subjects, 
shutting off East Prussia from the German 
Fatherland by her " corridor,' ' and holding the 
land routes by which Germany will seek to trade 
with Russia, seems committed to a perpetual feud. 
The Tchechs have been assisted to create a dwarf 
Empire, composed of Germans, Slovaks, and 
Ukrainians. The inclusion in it of the 3 J million 
Germans of Bohemia and Moravia is a peculiarly 
wanton violation of nationality, because they live 
mainly in a compact racial fringe along the bor- 
ders, and could with ease have been detached, to 



A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 165 

join their race-fellows of the Austrian and the Ger- 
man Republics. Finally, German- Austria, reduced 
to a little Alpine area which cannot possibly be 
self-supporting, is forbidden to exercise its free 
choice and may not seek a new career by union 
with federal Germany. Vienna, the overgrown 
head of this puny body, will dwindle by death or 
emigration to half its present size. The French 
settlement, in short, has created a German irre- 
denta, which will number at least twelve millions 
of the discontented. To sustain this arrangement 
these satellite States are linked up by unnatural 
military frontiers, and in all of them French mili- 
tary missions are forming the conscript armies 
destined to support the military hegemony of 
France. 

That Mr. Lloyd George acquiesced, no doubt 
with some reluctance, in this French scheme of 
settlement, is no accident. Our ruling class had 
its own aims to pursue, and if it assented to 
French ascendancy on the Continent, it did so 
consciously or half-consciously, in order the better 
to secure its own economic ambitions elsewhere. 
The main result of the Treaty, apart from these 
territorial and military dispositions in Europe, 
is to enhance our naval supremacy, to enlarge our 
overseas Empire, and to secure our control of the 
world's markets, raw materials, and transport. 
Our most formidable commercial competitor is 
ruined. 

The simplest but not perhaps the most impor- 



166 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

tant of the gains which British Imperialism ob- 
tains are its accessions of territory. One need 
not pause to argue that the " mandate' ' is as thin 
a disguise of annexation as the old protectorate. 
In effect, we have added to our Empire most of 
the German colonies in Africa and in the Pacific, 
the undeveloped wealth of Mesopotamia, and the 
strategically important regions of Palestine and 
possibly of Persia, while in Egypt our pos- 
session is finally secured. In all these lands we 
acquire immense potential resources in raw 
materials. 

With the exception of some small coasting ves- 
sels, the mercantile tonnage of Germany passes 
into our possession. It is true that it may not 
fully compensate us for our own losses in the 
U-boat war. It comes near, however (save for 
American competition), to conferring upon us a 
monopoly of the world's carrying trade. The 
mere cessation of her profits as a carrier is the 
least part of Germany's loss or of our gain. We 
acquire with her shipping the possibility of fixing 
the world's rates, and controlling the world's com- 
merce. Our only formidable European competitor 
at sea has been eliminated. Our shipping rings 
may choose their policy. They may elect either 
to boycott German goods and German ports, or 
else to secure for themselves a profit by carrying 
for her at rates which they can fix. 

The conventional treaty of history began with 
an appeal to Almighty God, and then declared 



A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 167 

the resolve of the contracting parties to live in 
4 'peace and amity." This Treaty omits that pro- 
fession of goodwill. The old-world model then 
proceeded to revive (at least as a provisional ar- 
rangement) the various treaties of commerce 
which had linked the belligerents before the out- 
break of war. There is no such clause in this 
Treaty. What treaties omit is often as important 
as what they include. The salient fact about this 
Treaty is that, from first to last, it restores none 
of the rights of reciprocity which habitually govern 
the relations of civilized States. In clause after 
clause Germany renounces her former rights: in 
no clause does she recover any of those rights 
which in the modern world are indispensable for 
the conduct of trade. Elaborate provisions in- 
sure the right of Allied subjects to trade with 
Germany, to reside in Germany, to pass their 
goods through her customs under the " most- 
favored-nation" clause without suffering discrim- 
ination, to fly over her territory, to use her rivers, 
to enjoy on her railways the same rates and fa- 
cilities as her own subjects; nay, even to require 
her to build new railways for the better transmis- 
sion of their goods. These are all one-sided privi- 
leges, and far from securing equal rights in return 
from them, the German trader secures no rights 
at all. Such rights as he may in practice enjoy 
will depend solely on the grace and goodwill of 
each of the Allies. Their tariffs may totally ex- 
clude his goods, or differentiate against them. 



168 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

Their railway and shipping rates may penalize 
his exports. Their legislation may exclude his 
business firms and his commercial travelers from 
their markets, and deny him the right to reside on 
their territories. Against any or all of these dis- 
criminations he is powerless, for he cannot re- 
taliate in kind. We used to talk of the economic 
"war after the war": there can be none, for the 
Allies will levy their measures against an enemy 
deprived of the rights of defense. In this con- 
dition, but little removed from outlawry, Germany 
will remain, until she is admitted to the League of 
Nations, and even then it is doubtful whether her 
status will be one of equality, for the Covenant of 
the League prescribes "equitable" but not 
"equal" treatment for the commerce of its mem- 
bers in each other's markets. Some privileges, 
the usual privileges of all Europeans, Germany 
is never likely to regain — the "extra-territorial" 
rights, for example, under which alone trade is 
possible in Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey. Her 
rivers, but no others, are placed under interna- 
tional control. 

At the moment, German traders have been ex- 
pelled from China, Africa, Turkey, and all the 
Allied territories. Their businesses, factories, 
warehouses, and banks are all confiscated and 
broken up. This Treaty confers no right to begin, 
however slowly, the toil of building up again that 
immense fabric of world-trade by which alone her 
population can live. Even if we omit all reckon- 



A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 169 

ing of the still uncounted, but probably excessive, 
indemnity (some indemnity by way of reparation 
is manifestly just), this denial of reciprocity in 
trading and residential rights is itself sufficient 
to ruin our competitor. Even if we assume that 
it will be modified, within two or three years, the 
period is sufficient to enable us in the interval to 
assure (with some American competition) our 
own monopoly of world-trade, especially in the 
great markets of China, Turkey, and Africa to 
which Germany will have no access. Our victory 
means that we control the world's markets, its 
shipping, its raw materials, and its banking. It 
may be that we shall dole out raw materials, 
though with a grudging hand, and allow the door 
of some of the markets we command to stand ajar. 
We must do this, for otherwise no indemnity could 
be earned, and our starving enemy would inevi- 
tably lapse into Bolshevism. We shall not pursue 
an unqualified policy of exclusion, but in every 
transaction we are in a position to levy a triple 
tribute on German trade. We shall take one profit 
on the raw materials that our brokers are per- 
mitted to sell to her, and another on the goods 
that we carry for her, and a third on the goods 
which our bankers and middlemen may consent 
to handle for her, in overseas markets. The van- 
quished must submit to be exploited by the victors, 
glad if their fate is not to be wholly boycotted. 1 

i " Exploit " is a slippery word. In this contest it means 
that while the services rendered by our shippers, bankers, and 



170 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

While this Peace creates for France an artificial 
military ascendancy on the Continent of Europe, it 
confirms and enhances our naval supremacy. The 
surrender of the German Fleet and the limitation 
of Germany's future building leave intact in the 
world no navy, save that of the United States, 
which could oppose us in any use which we might 
please to make of our power at sea. We have 
successfully resisted any proposals (if they were 
seriously made) to limit the naval armaments of 
the victors, or to restrict the range of naval power, 
by defining the Freedom of the Seas. The idea 
of the League of Nations had given a new mean- 
ing to that term. It ought now to mean that the 
terrific instrument of the blockade shall be re- 
served as a method of coercion which the League 
alone, acting under its Constitution, may apply, 
and then only for the common good, against a 
disturber of its peace. It is still open to us in 

middlemen will be real services, it is by the use of force that 
the enemy is obliged to have recourse to them. Lest it be said 
that this economic strangulation is a moral discipline, necessary 
to secure reparation for Germany's victims, let me point out 
that it is not her victims who will profit by it. This triple 
tribute will go, not to Belgium nor to France, nor even to our 
own Exchequer; it will go into the private pockets of British 
and American financiers and merchants. So far from promoting 
the payment of an indemnity by Germany, it will diminish the 
earnings by foreign trade out of which Germany must meet her 
liabilities. The official excuse for laming the industrial efficiency 
of Germany seems to be that we must do so in order to prevent 
German industries from competition with those of the devastated 
areas. But we allow British and American industry to compete 
with Belgian and French industry. 



A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 171 

certain cases, in spite of its covenant, to use the 
blockade in our private quarrels, without the sanc- 
tion of the League 's Court or Council. 1 Mr. Lloyd 
George has said that a fleet cannot be used as an 
engine of aggression. It can be used to starve an 
opponent into surrender, to close his factories, 
condemn his workers to unemployment, subject his 
children to the miseries of diseases, of malnutri- 
tion, lower the vitality of a whole generation, 
menace his State with disorder and revolution, 
and in the end to impose a settlement of violence. 
If any delusion survives, that the blockade, be- 
cause it is bloodless, is a painless or humane 
method of coercion, we have learnt little from this 
war. It is in some sense a more cruel method 
than war, because it strikes, above all, at the poor, 
arid among the poor chiefly at the children, the 
aged, and the women. An army may carry out 
a total devastation of a limited area, as the Ger- 
man army did in Northern France ; our blockade, 
justifiable, no doubt, up to the date of the armis- 
tice, but no longer, effected a partial devastation 
of the entire area from the Khine to the Urals. 
The cities stand intact and the fields are still 
green, but every human being who survives it has 
suffered a physical and moral deterioration, and 

i We must, of course, submit to the prescribed delay and 
submit our dispute to the Council, but unless it unanimously 
finds us in the wrong, we may thereafter do as we please. Since 
most of the Council consists of our Allies, it is never likely to 
pronounce unanimously against us. 



172 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

the toll of the dead civilians who stand to its ac- 
count must be reckoned far above a million. From 
actual war the knowledge that we ourselves must 
suffer casualties and loss is a deterrent, but a 
people with a supreme navy may embark lightly 
on a blockade. We could fasten the doors of 
Europe if we kept our armies at home, without 
loss of life to ourselves, and at the end of the 
process dictate a victor's terms. While we retain 
the physical means of exercising this coercion and 
decline to bind ourselves to use it only at the 
bidding and in the service of the whole of civiliza- 
tion, the shadow of force still darkens the life of 
humanity, and the world is not yet built upon law. 
Force works even when it is not actually applied. 
In every dispute or negotiation, our arguments 
derive from this power that we have retained in 
our own unfettered hands a cogency which may 
have no relation to justice. 

On to this old-world settlement the Liberalism 
of Mr. Wilson has grafted, as a pathetic survival 
of his defeated idealism, the institution of the 
League of Nations. So far from redeeming his 
failure, it may in fact aggravate, because it must 
stereotype it. The most iniquitous arrangements 
of the Peace have acquired the sanctity of seem- 
ing right, and all civilization is pledged to defend 
them and maintain them. The League, founded 
without Germany or Eussia, is, before all else, an 
alliance of the victors to insure their conquests. 
One single provision in its covenant stamps it as 



A COMMENT ON THE PEACE 173 

a deliberately conservative creation. No decision 
of any importance can be taken and no valid 
award can be rendered without the unanimity of 
its Council, and that Council is nothing but a 
league of the allied Governments of the victorious 
Great Powers, diluted only by the presence of cer- 
tain of their more dependent satellites. 1 The 
single voice of France could by this arrangement 
defeat any proposal to permit the union of Austria 
with Germany or to revise the settlement by which 
the Poles and the Tchecho-Slovaks have acquired 
millions of unwilling German subjects. There can 
be under this provision for unanimity no modifi- 
cation of the military ascendancy of France or of 
the naval supremacy of Great Britain. The 
League, moreover, makes no real attempt to im- 
pose economic peace, and nothing in its covenant 
strikes at preferential and differential trading 
(outside the areas under "mandates")* or prom- 
ises the just apportionment of the world's raw 
materials. The Constitution of the League con- 
tains no rudiment of democratic or Parliamentary 
government, nor does it set up, even for the pur- 
pose of the impartial settlement of disputes, 
any Council of Conciliation independent of the 
masters of the greater armies and navies of the 
world. Like the old Holy Alliance, this tremen- 
dous concentration of force will be used by the 



i Among the nine members of the Council, Spain is the only 
neutral. 



174 ACROSS THE BLOCKADE 

satisfied Powers to maintain the existing order, to 
prevent salutary change, and to repress any 
people which seeks to amend its condition by 
revolution. 1 

The age which this Treaty ushers in will be, 
even more than the generation which preceded it, 
an age of Imperialism, in which the ruling classes 
of the victors will increase their power, through 
the control of monopolized raw materials. First 
by the blockade and then by the economic servi- 
tude imposed upon Central Europe it has pre- 
pared the forces which will challenge it, and may 
one day replace it. The social struggle between 
capital and the workers will slowly, and with vary- 
ing success, assert itself across the surviving ra- 
cial antagonisms. The outlook is dark. It will 
lighten only when labor begins to understand how 
the subtle and subconscious working of economic 
motive has bent patriotism to its ends, turned our 
idealisms and our righteous angers into its serv- 
ants, and made by this greedy settlement the pros- 
pect perhaps of great riches for the few, but also 
of new wrongs, new wars, new oppressions. 

1 By the simple expedient of refusing " official recognition " 
to any new Government which they disliked (e.g. to any purely 
Socialist Government) the Great Powers who dominate the 
League may deprive any nation, even if it were a member of 
the League, of its rights under the Covenant and make of 
it an outlaw liable to be coerced or blockaded without appeal 
or redress. 



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